“Oh, Davy, I shall want to kill myself to-night for—”
“No, don’t say that. Now, I am going to be just as honest with you.”
I saw her hand steal up to her throat and hurried on to end the suspense.
“I feel just as you do. I am not in love with you, and yet I can imagine, just as you said, that if some day I married you a great happiness would come into my life. Would to God I could say more!”
She turned for the first time as I began to speak and her eyes went to mine. I had a strange premonition there in the green light of the forest, in the stillness of the carpeted woods, the stillness that was in her listening face, that beyond the inscrutable future, through what twisted tormented ways I know not, in some final calm, just for the strange incongruous daring of that moment, Anne and I would end as husband and wife. Premonition or illusion,—I write it down as I felt it.
“Will you really believe me?” she said, and her glance went down, “when I say that I should never, never have said even this if—if it were not that you are going back, and everything else seems so little beside that. Will you understand that I can be like this, that without being in love I can look into the future and see what may come? David, it’s—it’s so hard to say—”
“I don’t think so. Say just what you feel, and then I shall be just as honest.”
“You have always been different in my life, David. Other men have just been shells. You I’ve known, and you’ve known me. It isn’t that, oh, since we are talking this way, it’s this: I know my weaknesses, Davy—oh, so well—and I know what I’ll become if I marry a certain type of man. It’s what you bring out in me, the thing I want to be when I’m with you. Of course, it sounds terribly—I’m ashamed to say it. No, don’t look at me; but David, I can say this—when you come back—some day, when it’s all over—I shan’t have changed.”
“Shan’t have what?”
“Changed,” she said, in a whisper.