Meg struggled and laughed. "I'm so glad my face is all right, that you like it, Mike."
Mike laughed. "I shouldn't mind if you weren't beautiful, you know I shouldn't, for you'd still be you."
Meg's practical common sense was not to be drugged by love's ether.
"Dear," she said happily, "don't talk rubbish! As if you, with your
artistic sense and love of beauty, would have fallen in love with me if
I had turned-in-feet and a face half forehead, just because I was me!"
They both laughed happily. Then Michael said, sadly and abruptly—his voice had lost its confidence—"Why have I let myself say all this, Meg? What thrust my feelings into expression, feelings I scarcely was conscious of possessing until I saw you lit up by the shining stars? I never, never planned such a thing."
"I know," Meg said. "We neither of us dreamed of it when we left the hut, did we?"
"I had a thousand other things to consult you about, to tell you," he said. "I have a thousand other things to do. I have a mission to fulfil before I speak of love. It just came, it suddenly bubbled up and poured over like water in a too-full bottle."
"Do you regret it?" Margaret said simply and sympathetically. She was not hurt; she knew what he meant; she knew that he had more than once spoken of the single-heartedness of a man's work, the work which Mike hoped to do, when he had no family ties, no woman's love to bind him, to nourish and satisfy.
"Dearest—I don't regret it," he said. "It was inevitable. Something else would have called it forth if the stars hadn't. All the same, it is of you I am thinking . . . I had no right to . . ."
"To what, Mike?"
"I'm a drifter, Meg, and I'm not ready to be anything else—I can't be."