'I—scorn you! ... I wouldn't scorn you.'
'And even your scorn wouldn't kill my love,' he said, in that moved voice that was so unlike his ordinary utterance—'because there's nothing in the Universe, so far as I know it, that would be able to do that. Why, it seems to me that my feeling for you is as much a part of myself as the very blood in my heart. I knew you were the only woman in the world for me the moment I saw you—so slim and small and strange, the very contrary of what I'd always thought would be the kind of woman I'd be in love with—that day when you came walking along that gangway behind Lady Tallant. It was just a revelation, and then I bolted straight off to Alexandra City.'
'Which seems rather odd, doesn't it, in the circumstances?'
'No, it's this way. I had to take a few days for getting over the shock—for rubbing in the fact that what I wanted more than anything on God's earth, now I'd seen it, was utterly beyond my reach.'
'One might think I was an enchanted princess—a sort of Brunhilda guarded by a fiery dragon.'
'That's a good bit of how I looked on you—though I've never made much out of Wagner—he isn't human enough for me.... And how could I have dreamed then that you'd ever let me come as near you as I am this evening!'
'I must say, Mr McKeith, you haven't shown such extreme diffidence in approaching me.'
'Ah! Because you soon showed that Brunhilda's dragon was only pasteboard and blue fire after all—one of the shams you despise. I'm not afraid of him now.... Oh, it's wonderful.... It's beautiful....'
He took her other hand and held the two covered over by his own as he said with an odd solemnity:
'Lady Bridget O'Hara will you come away with me to the Bush, leaving everything else behind you?'