“Bernoline, Bernoline, why deny it?” I cried, bending over her. “You don’t deceive me; you don’t deceive yourself! What stands between us? What can stand? What do we care? What else counts but this thing we feel, here, now, at this very moment! We know. You know, as I know. Happiness, Bernoline? Do you think in the whole world there is any happiness for me away from you—from the longing for you, day and night! Bernoline, I tell you, you have never been an hour away from me. I have had you before my eyes; I have talked with you; lived over a thousand times each moment spent with you. Bernoline, turn to me, look at me, tell me—”
Do I know what I said, there in the deep pool of the night! It is not words, but accents, that we hear at such times. I don’t know that she heard me any more than I can remember the torrent of pleading that surged to my lips, but I know that she, too, felt the snapping of cords, the longing of my arms to reach out and draw her up to me, the wild triumphant force beating down all our little struggling, closing about us and confounding us in one impulse, one desire, for, all at once, she swayed from me and began to tremble, crying: “Don’t touch me, David. I can’t stand it—don’t!”
“But why, in heaven’s name, why?” Her voice stirred all my compassion, but the thought that I was fighting for my happiness, her happiness, was stronger. I came closer. “Bernoline, what is it? Pride? Is that all? Do you think I care who you are, what you are, what was your family, or anything else? You are you. And now, listen to me, Bernoline. To-morrow, I go back. Marry me to-night; be my wife. Let me take that with me in my heart!”
“If I could, if I only could!” she burst out suddenly.
“You can, you will,” I said, with a sudden sense of triumphant victory, pitiless, as in love we are driven to show no mercy. “Bernoline, whatever it is, I have the right to share it. Yes, the right. Nothing else matters but you in my life. Do you understand? You are life!”
She turned to me, struggling against herself, her hands clasped, and again the terror in her eyes.
“I can’t. I can’t.”
“But why, why?”
Suddenly, like a flash, I remembered the first instinctive question of Anne’s. My heart contracted so sharply that for a moment I could not voice the terrible doubt.
“Bernoline—is there—any one else—who has a right?”