"What?" he demanded, his senses swimming in hopeless confusion. "What?"
She did not say that she knew that he did not love her; she did not tell him how much his quixotic chivalry moved her. Nor did she tell him that she knew only too well that she could lead him to hell, as he said, but that that was the only place that she could lead him. These things she felt positive of, but to mention them meant an argument—and an argument would have been unendurable.
"No," she repeated, "I don't love you. You see, you're so different from what I remembered. You've grown up and you've changed. Why, Hugh, we're strangers. I've realized that while you've been talking. We don't know each other, not a bit. We only saw each other for a week summer before last and for two days last spring. Now we're two altogether different people; and we don't know each other at all."
She prayed that he would deny her statements, that he would say they knew each other by instinct—anything, so long as he did not agree.
"I certainly don't know you the way you're talking now," he said almost roughly, his pride hurt and his mind in a turmoil. "I know that we don't know each other, but I never thought that you thought that mattered."
Her hands clenched more tightly for an instant—and then lay open and limp in her lap.
Her lips were trembling; so she smiled. "I didn't think it mattered until you asked me to marry you. Then I knew it did. It was game of you to offer to take a chance, but I'm not that game. I couldn't marry a strange man. I like that man a lot, but I don't love him—and you don't want me to marry you if I don't love you, do you, Hugh?"
"Of course not." He looked down in earnest thought and then said softly, his eyes on the table, "I'm glad that you feel that way, Cynthia." She bit her lip and trembled slightly. "I'll confess now that I don't think that I love you, either. You sweep me clean off my feet when I'm with you, but when I'm away from you I don't feel that way. I think love must be something more than we feel for each other." He looked up and smiled boyishly. "We'll go on being friends anyhow, won't we?"
Somehow she managed to smile back at him. "Of course," she whispered, and then after a brief pause added: "We had better go now. Your train will be leaving pretty soon."
Hugh pulled out his watch. "By jingo, so it will."