"Friend?" she repeated, lifting her head and gazing at him through her tears. "I'm more than that. There isn't anything I wouldn't do for you, and I thought—I thought—"
For an instant Emil saw her judicially. "So that's it?" he reflected, but the next instant the male in him was completely glamoured.
For the last time some positive seduction in Annie overcame him. Love will polish even a plain woman to something approaching brilliancy, and Annie was by no means plain. Her hair gave out a delicate odour; the pupils of her eyes, usually small, spilled their black over the blue of the irises; her little mouth emitted a whole troop of sighs; the stuff of her waist crackled, as if, though it fitted her body, it compressed her heart. In truth, that which was the heart in her, the soul in her, was striving mightily to come to him, and being a man he did not refuse it.
"Do—do you mean that you would marry me?" he hazarded unsteadily, "without prospects—nothing? You can see for yourself, everything I put my hand to turns out wrong," he added argumentatively.
She nodded. A look of ecstasy overspread her face.
What he experienced chiefly was a profound astonishment.
He moved back a step in order to study her. That she felt in this way toward him was no news, but that she was ready to take the decisive step now, when his whole outlook was altered.... In his gaze there grew a peculiar gentleness and simplicity.
"Yes, but what about your father, what will he say?" he inquired, dallying dreamily with the consideration.
"Father, oh, he'll bluster at first, but he'll forgive us. I know him. Besides, hasn't he stolen your invention?"
"So it's only fair I should steal his daughter; is that it?" This question, like the other, was an idle playing with the subject, as though, for the moment, his will went in leash to hers.