"Because," he said, "I wanted to talk to you."
"It didn't look so. It looked as if you wanted to talk to Mr. Nicholson."
"I wanted to talk to you and about you."
She stopped fencing. She gave him her full, frank gaze.
"Well?" she asked.
"You know what I want to say, Betty," he answered. "You've seen for a long time what I was coming to. I held off. I held off because I hadn't anything to offer you. Even now I haven't much. I haven't half enough. If I win this fight I'm in, it won't give me anything that would make me deserve you. I've not been a bit better than I should be." His voice grew tense. "When I come down to brass tacks, when I—I beg your pardon; but what I mean is that when I get to the point of telling you I love you, I see how far I've been from being what I should be. I—— Oh, hang it all, Betty!" He put out his hands. "I love you. I've never really loved anybody else and never can. If I win this confounded—blessed fight, will you marry me?"
She got slowly to her feet: it seemed to Luke minutes before she had stood up and begun her answer. Then she took both his hands.
"You don't have to win the fight to win me, Luke," she said.
The realization swept over him. He took her in his arms. He looked in her upturned face—the eyes wide, the sweet, fresh cheeks hot, the lips parted, breathing quickly—and then he felt the blood rush to his head, felt it hammer at his temples. It got into his eyes and blinded him. He ground his lips upon hers.
The dull despair of his last months under Leighton commanded a reaction. The rushing changes of the last two days had set his nerves to a speed that would not now cease in whatever physical activities he engaged himself. These things flung him along a new road; they raced him down a way of which he had known but little. As he felt the warmth of her gracious young body next his, he was hurled with such violence down a course so unfamiliar to him that only the thought of losing his race by running it too swiftly could serve to lessen his straining speed. Like a quarter-mile runner stopping himself short in the last hundred yards before the tape, he almost fell as he forced himself to release her.