"Nonsense!" Mildred was really indignant. "I told you to fix your own time and I promised to wait. Even if I had not—cared for you, I would have kept my word. That is a Wayland principle. As it is, it was—comparatively easy."
"Then you do love me, my Lady?" He leaned eagerly toward her.
"Do you need to ask?" she whispered from the shelter of his arms. "It is the same old fascination of our girl and boy days. Do you remember how completely I lost my head about you?" She laughed softly. "I used to think you wore a football suit better than anybody in the world! Sometimes I suspect that it is merely that same girlish hero-worship and can't last. But it has lasted—so far. Three years is a long time for a girl like me to wait, isn't it?"
"I know! I know!" he returned, jealously. "But I have lived that time with nothing but a memory, while you have had other things to occupy you. You are flattered and courted by men, scores of men—"
"Oh!"
"Legions of men! Oh, I know. Haven't I devoured society columns by the yard? The papers were six months old, to be sure, when I got them, but every mention of you was like a knife stab to me. Jealousy drove me to memorize the name of every man with whom you were seen in public, and I called down all sorts of curses upon their heads. I used to torture my lonely soul with hideous pictures of you—"
"Hideous pictures of me?" The girl perked her head to one side and glanced at him bewitchingly, "You're very flattering!"
"Yes, pictures of you with a caravan of suitors at your heels."
"You foolish boy! Suitors don't come in caravans they come in cabs."
"Well, my simile isn't far wrong in other respects," he replied, with a flash of her spirit. "But anyhow I pictured you surrounded by all the beautiful things of your life here, forever in the scent of flowers, in the lights of drawing-rooms, in the soft music of hidden instruments. God! how I tortured myself! You were never out of mind for an hour. My days were given to you, and I used to pray that my dreams might hold nothing but you. You have been my fetish from the first day I met you, and my worship has grown blinder every hour, Mildred. You were always out of my reach, but I have kept my eyes raised toward you just the same, and I have never looked aside, never faltered." He paused to feast his eyes upon her, and then in a half-whisper finished, "Oh, my Lady, how beautiful you are!"