"I think, Miss Willis," he said gently, "that you should have told me this before."
"How could I?" begged the girl. "When could I have done it? Why should I?"
"I do not know," he answered wearily; "only, perhaps it might have spared me some shade of human anguish."
"Human?" asked Daphne, almost smiling.
"No, no, no," he interrupted, not hearing her. "It would not have done any good, for I have loved you from the first minute when I saw your blue drapery flutter in your flight from me. Some deeper sense than mortals have told me that every footstep was falling on my sleeping heart and waking it to life. You were not running away; in some divine sense you were coming toward me. Daphne, Daphne, I cannot let you go!"
The look in the girl's startled eyes was his only answer. By the side of this sun-browned face, in its beauty and its power, rose before her a vision of Eustace Denton, pale, full-lipped, with an ardor for nothingness in his remote blue eyes. How could she have known, in those old days before her revelation came, that faces like this were on the earth: how could she have dreamed that glory of life like this was possible?
In the great strain of the moment they both grew calm and Daphne told him her story, as much of it as she thought it wise for him to know. Her later sense of misgiving, the breaking of the engagement, the penitence that had led to a renewal of the bonds, she concealed from him; but he learned of the days of study and of quiet work in the shaded corners of her father's library, and of those gayer days and evenings when the figure of the young ascetic had seemed to the girl to have a peculiar saving grace, standing in stern contrast to the social background of her life.
He thanked her, when she had finished, and he watched her, with her background of misty blue distance, sitting where the shadow of the ilexes brought out the color of her scarlet lips and deep gray eyes.
"Daphne," he said presently, "you have told me much about this man, but you have not told me that you love him. You do not speak of him as a woman speaks of the man who makes her world for her. You defend him, you explain him, you plead his cause, and it must be that you are pleading it with yourself, for I have brought no charge, that you must defend him to me. Do you love him?"
She did not answer.