I took you in my arms, and gave you back your kiss twofold, while saying, “Good-night, my love.”
XXVI
A man does not willingly spread on paper the sweetest and tenderest moments of his life. When half crazed with grief and illness I might express my suffering, much as, in physical pain, some groan aloud; but the deepest happiness is silent, for it is too great to be told. And lest, my dears, you think me even less manly than I am, I choose to add here the reason for my writing the last few pages of this story of my love, that if you ever read it you may know the motive which made me tell what till to-night I have kept locked in my heart.
This evening the dearest woman in the world came to me, as I sat at my desk in the old library, and asked, “Are you busy, Donald?”
“I am reading the one hundred and forty-seventh complimentary review of my History of the Moors, and I am so sick of sweets that your interruption comes as an unalloyed pleasure.”
“Am I bitter or acid?” she asked, leaning over my shoulder and arranging my hair, which is one of her ways of pleasing me.
“You are my exact opposite,” I said gravely.
“How uncomplimentary you are!” she cried, with a pretense of anger in her voice.
“An historian must tell the truth now and then, for variety’s sake.”