He tried to evade a reply, but she persisted. Then at last he confessed to his foolish jealousy of Mr. Hayle. “I had no reason to think you cared for me in the least, remember,” he said. “All that time at Hivèritz, your manner was more discouraging than any coldness. You were so dreadfully friendly and unconstrained.”
“Yet you were happy there?” she said.
“Yes,” he said, “but I was deceiving myself. I thought I was satisfied with what I believed to be all you could give me—your friendship. Then my eyes were opened, and since then—oh! what a dreary mockery everything has seemed all this time!”
“Yes,” she whispered, “I know. I thought it was only I that felt it so. I thought you had quite forgotten, or outgrown any other feeling—that you were glad to be able to keep to your theory of not letting love gain much hold of you, and I tried to think I was satisfied too.”
“Ah, yes! My theories,” he said, with a smile. “I thought I could keep Love in its place. It never struck me that Love may be a master, not in the sense of a tyrant, but of a teacher. But I shall be an apt pupil now. Cicely, I love you with heart and soul, and mind and conscience approve. It is the best of me that loves you, my darling—I understand now how such love can be called divine, and I feel that it must be immortal.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, as if thinking aloud. “Yes, I understand it now:
“‘Sole spark from God’s life at strife,
With death, so, sure of range above
The limits here.’
I never understood it before as I do now.”
And Cicely understood it too.
“Do you know,” he went on, do you know that it is just three years—three years this very evening—since I first saw you, Cicely?”