"Just one ambition stands out above every other," continued the man with a noble earnestness—"the ambition to make you happy—to protect you, to worship you, and to help you do the things you want to do in the world. For marriage isn't a selfish thing! It doesn't mean the extinction of a woman's career in order that a man may have his. It is the surrender of each to the other for the greater happiness and the higher power of both."
Suddenly a choke came in the big man's voice.
"That's what I feel, my dear girl," he concluded abruptly, with an excess of reverence in his tones, "and that's what I want to do!"
As he spoke, John had lifted her hands higher and higher till one rested on each of his shoulders. Man and woman, they looked straight into each other's eyes, as they had that day upon the cliff, but this time it was his lip that quivered and his eyes that misted over.
Bessie, sobered for a moment almost to a sense of unworthiness, as she felt all at once what it meant for a great-hearted man to so declare himself to a woman, saw something in that growing mist which impelled her to immediately reward the tenderness of such devotion with a frank confession of her own.
"Well," she breathed naïvely, "you have my permission to do all those things. I'm sure, John, the biggest fact, the biggest love, the biggest career in the world for me is just you!"
Bessie accompanied the words with an ecstatic little shrug of the shoulders and a self-abandoning toss of the head.
Reverently John pressed his lips upon hers and held her close for a very, very long time; while a thrill of indescribable bliss surged over and engulfed him. His embrace was gentle, even reverent; but it seemed he could not let her out of his arms. Here at last was one treasure he could never surrender; one renunciation he could never make.
"And to think," sighed Bessie, after a long and blissful silence, finding such rapture in nestling in those strong arms that she was still unwilling to lift her head from where she could feel the beating of his happy heart, "to think how long we have loved each other without expressing it; how loyal we have been to each other's love even before we had grown to recognize it for what it truly was."
Bessie looked up suddenly. It seemed to her that John's heart had done a funny thing; that it staggered and missed a beat.