"Betty," he said, "do you mean——"
She did not quail.
"I mean I love you."
"What?" He drew back, afraid of her, afraid of himself.
"I know you weren't yourself," she said. "I know how all this trouble has upset you. I know you didn't mean those things."
The reversal was too much for him. He leaned against the table and burst into laughter. An instant ago the roar of the crowd had seemed miles away, had seemed no more than any recurrent noise of city life. They two, Betty and he, had seemed to him set apart from it all, remote from it, together. Now——
"Luke!" she was crying.
A picture drifted into his mind. It was a picture of pine trees and the sun in a blue sky full of fleecy clouds and a long white road winding, dusty and carefree, to the end of the world.
"Luke——"
He could not hear her now. He saw terror in her face, but the noise from the street rose, rattled at the window-pane, and engulfed her words.