"I've always loved you, all my life long. Only I didn't know it was you. Do you remember my telling you that your dream was divorced from reality? It wasn't true. That was what was wrong with me."
"I'm afraid I wasn't always very faithful to my dream."
"Because your dream wasn't always faithful to you. And yet it was faithful."
"Lucy, do you remember the things I told you? Can you forgive me for being what I was?"
"It was before I knew you."
"Yes, but after? That was worse; it was the worst thing I ever did, because I had known you."
She wondered why he asked forgiveness of her now, of all moments; and as she wondered the light dawned on her.
"I forgive you everything. It was my fault. I should have been there, and I wasn't."
Then he knew that after all she had understood. Her love was in her eyes, in their light and in their darkness. They gathered many flames of love into that tender tragic gaze, all pitying, half maternal. Those eyes had never held for him the sad secrets of mortality. Love in them looked upon things invisible, incorruptible; divining, even as it revealed, the ultimate mystery. He saw that in her womanhood Nature was made holy, penetrated by the spirit and the fire of God. He knelt down and laid his face against her shoulder, and her arm, caressing, held him there, as if it were she who sheltered and protected.
"Keith," she whispered, "did you mean to marry me before you came this time, or after?"