"I would always love you, always! Can you not see," indignantly, "how a man can adore one woman and yet not be blind to all others?"
"No!" with hot energy, "I would not share my love with every pretty face and every new ambition."
Lawson was too angry at the moment for speech, but Frances did not heed it.
"No! By and by when your life would be full and happy, and you would hail each new phase with eagerness, I, if I were by your side, would be growing colder and less attractive in my iciness, and we should be—Oh no!" with a dramatic gesture, "it is better so!"
Again there was a dreamy silence, the winds sighing softly over the fields and singing in the trees.
"You have all your life before you once more," said Frances, after many moments, "youth and wealth and freedom!"
"But you?" cried the young man.
"I!" she smiled softly, "think of me as the unattainable, and so," and she showed how keen her knowledge of the man was, as she said it, and how true her words of knowledge gained through sorrow, "and so you will never forget! Good-by!"
"That other man," he insisted, without a notice of the finality of her speech, "he loves you as you demand?"