"Ah! I see, Miss Van Ashton," he answered, regarding her compassionately. "You quite overlook the true facts of the case. This is not at all a question of what you may want, but of what is best for you. I have merely been trying to tell you in my awkward way that it is not good for one to live alone." She laughed hysterically. The colossal impudence of the man took her breath away. She gasped—attempted to speak, but words failing her, turned her back upon him and began tearing into shreds the end of the silken gauze Indian scarf which she wore over her shoulders.
"Can't you think of what you want, Miss Van Ashton?" he asked gently, in the tone of one addressing a refractory child.
"No!" she screamed, without at all realizing what she was saying. To think that this man was able to play with her like a worm on the end of a pin! It was too much! "How dare you! I—I hate you!" she cried, without turning round and quite beside herself. There was no mistaking her attitude; he had gone far enough. The limit of her endurance had been reached, and he suddenly became serious. Again there was silence between them.
"Miss Van Ashton," he said, drawing himself up, "it really doesn't matter what you or the rest of the world may think of me so long as I can see you. Can you imagine what it would be like if you were never to see the sun again? What could be more absurd than to allow such a trifle as convention to come between you and me? Three feet of wretched adobe wall between me and heaven!" he burst forth. "The idea's preposterous! Why, if you shut yourself up in that miserable hovel again, I'll set fire to the place!" She knew he would.
"Can't you understand," he went on, his voice softening, "that your attitude has aroused the savage, the primeval man in me—that, had I met you here fifty or a hundred years ago, I would have picked you up and quietly carried you away? I know I've been a brute by driving you into the open like this, but that's not me, myself—the man who loves you, who would pass through fire for you, who has dreamed of you and watched and waited through the long years for your coming; and now that you have come, you surely can't blame me for what I cannot help—for loving you and telling you so in my own way?"
She tried in vain to stifle the emotion his words aroused. She had set out with the intention of wringing this avowal from him in jest, but how differently it affected her now that she heard it. She forgot her anger, everything, in fact, as she listened to the flow of his passion and longed to hear him continue. Every note of his voice thrilled her as it did on the day she first saw him. She remembered that she experienced a peculiar sensation at the time; that his appearance reminded her of the heroic type of manhood which the ancients had sought to depict in their marbles. In him she had unconsciously recognized the true spirit of the Argonaut on whose brow rests the star of empire. She did not idealize him; she simply recognized him for what he was—a man; one in whose soul the sentiment and enthusiasm of youth still sat enthroned, not smothered by the crushing process of modern civilization which was the case with the men she knew. A terror seized her as she compared the latter to him, and beheld how small they appeared beside him.
"Miss Van Ashton," he continued passionately, "you wouldn't thank me if I continued to bandy words with the woman I love, whose presence has become the sunshine of life to me. The whole world has become filled with song since you came into my life. Music and laughter have taken the place of loneliness and despair. Flowers spring from the earth where your feet rest! Don't imagine that you can ever estrange yourself from me. Wherever you are, by day or by night, waking or dreaming, I also will be there and ever whispering:
'Bessie Van Ashton, I love you—you have filled my life so completely I can't live without you!'"
Had her face been turned toward him, he would have seen that it was radiant, that her eyes shone with unusual brilliancy, that her hands trembled beneath the folds of her scarf where she had concealed them.
"Bessie, sweet—"