“Ah, but I am afraid of something, Tamea dear. I am afraid I do not love you, with a sufficiently great love to marry you. Perhaps that which I think is love is not really love, but passion.”
She laughed softly. Such fine distinctions were too difficult for her to fathom. “What is love without passion?” she protested, “and what an unlovely thing would be passion without love. Fear not, beloved. All is well with that dear heart of yours, and even if it should be that you do not love me too well—that some day your love should grow cold and you should leave me—still would I ask of you tonight all the love of which you are capable. Is it not better to have known a little happiness than none at all? I think so. For look you, dear one. When the parting comes—if come it should as Mellengair foretold that night—you will leave me as you came to me—in love. What manner of fool is the woman who would strive to hold a man whose love has grown cold and dim like the stars at dawn? When you weary of me, Dan Pritchard, you will tell me; then, because I shall always love you, I will prove my love; I will send you away with a smile and a kiss. Ah, sweetheart, will that day ever come? I think not. I think I shall never grow old or stale or intolerable to you.”
“Never,” he promised, profoundly touched by her sweetness, her candor and amazing magnetism. “You are driving me mad with longing for you, Tamea.”
“And I am driving you mad against your will?”
He nodded.
Tamea actually chuckled, took his none too handsome, solemn face between her two palms and looked at him long, earnestly and impersonally, as one looks at an infant. She appeared to be puzzling something out in her unspoiled mind.
“Such men as have sought me heretofore,” she said presently—“and I have not been without attraction to several—have desired me—well, you understand. There was that in their eyes that frightened me or disgusted me and I would have none of them. I could read their hearts. They said of me: ‘Ah, here is a half-caste maid. She is like the others—a trusting, silly half-caste, without pride or dignity. I will amuse myself with her.’ But you are different, chéri. It is not a woman you seek, but a woman with a soul. I think I love you best because you are a gentleman. I have not had many advantages, but something calls out in me here”—she beat her breast—“to be different, that I may be beloved by such as you.”
He murmured helplessly: “Well, I’ll be damned!”
“Possibly. Your white world is a strange world, with many things and many customs that damn one—particularly a woman. Yet would I follow you to damnation. Would you follow me?”
“I don’t know, Tamea. It requires courage for a white man to quarrel with his white world—that is, such a white man as am I. Some of us choose unhappiness rather than affront our world, you know.”