For half an hour he talked, going into every detail of his plan. And then all at once he stopped abruptly as though he had grown suddenly weary of Carlsbad. She sat gazing into the fire, waiting in sympathetic silence, for him to resume the subject. But he didn't resume it. When he spoke again, his tone had changed as well as his theme. For the first time the conversation became keenly personal. He talked about himself with a humility that was quite new and, to his listener, somewhat startling.
"I don't think it can be a complete surprise to you," he said, "to know how much I need you; how much I depend upon your sympathy and understanding. You must have guessed something of my feeling. You are too intuitive not to have guessed."
Her frank, blue-gray eyes were fixed upon him with an expression that baffled him, yet gave him hope. "No, it is not quite unexpected," she admitted. "But I didn't realize that it had gone quite so far. It seems to have all happened rather suddenly. We haven't known each other very long; not nearly long enough for anything like this."
"No. But I've been looking for you all my life. That ought to count for something."
"For something—yes. But not for so much as—that."
"Love isn't a matter of time," he told her.
"No. But it's a matter of exploration. It's a matter of finding each other. And in the half a dozen times that you have called here, Mr. Glover, we haven't talked about the finding kind of things. No, we don't know each other. We don't know each other half well enough to consider anything like this."
"But we can get to know each other better. Is there any reason why we should not do that?"
She pondered this for a moment. "Well, for one thing, there is distance."
"There is no longer distance," he pleaded eagerly. "For I have severed my connections with Mont-Mer."