“Do you mean to say—Mary—do you mean that you love me? And all this time—”
A smile broke through her tears.
“Can’t you believe it?” she said. “At least, you may absolve me from having ever told you anything but the plain truth as to my feelings towards you,” she added. Then he, too, smiled.
“But,” she added, “the last time we met, you yourself called it an ‘infatuation.’ I thought you had grown ashamed of it.”
“Ashamed of it,” he repeated, “ashamed of loving you? My darling! Ashamed of my reckless inconsideration for your feelings?—yes, I had reason to be that. And an infatuation it certainly did seem, to believe that there was any possibility of your ever learning to care for me, for there were all those months of disappointment after my conduct in that wretched complication had been cleared up, and day by day Alys hoped, and I hoped, for some sign from you. And then what you said to me the day of the marriage I looked upon as merely wrung from you by your brave conscientiousness—that made you feel your acknowledgment of mistake was due even to me. Do you see?”
“Yes,” said Mary; “but,” she added, shyly, “what made you change?”
“Your letter to Alys partly; by-the-bye, you have to tell me how you came to change so as to write it? And then—I don’t know how it was—I felt my case so desperate; I had nothing to lose, and oh, Mary, what an inestimable possibility to gain! I made up my mind to try once more, and as soon as I could leave Alys I came home, never hoping, however, to see you here—in the very lion’s den!”
“Does Alys know why you came?”
“No, I would never have told her, or any one, had I failed. But to think that I have won!—Mary, I never before in all my life dreamed of such happiness. I have everything that makes life worth having given to me in you. And, do you know,” he added, with a sort of boyish naïveté, “I don’t think I ever realised how wonderfully pretty you are? What have you been doing to yourself?”
Mary laughed—a happy, heartful laugh that fully vindicated the youthfulness she had begun to believe a thing of the past. She was not above feeling delight at his thinking her pretty.