He appeared entertained by her adamantine air. "Why not?"
"It isn't an absence of a week or two," she said, trying to show herself reasonable. "It will be six months before I am able to work again."
"A whole six months?"
She met the mockery in his tone with quiet determination. "I could not allow anyone to support me for that period. Do you not see that I must find something to do in order to remain happy?"
"Happy? You do not consider my side. Do you not see that a haggling calendar account of weeks and months is not applicable to such service as you render me? How would the satisfaction of saving the modest sum I pay you compare with that I should derive from enabling you to get well as rapidly as possible, untormented by painful necessities?"
There was a strange gleam in his eyes. She looked at him wonderingly. His rhetoric troubled her, and by dint of it he had managed to make her scruples seem ungenerous. But she was unconvinced.
"You would be obliged to pay someone else," she replied with cruel practicality.
"Enough of this," he said, impetuously. "It is absurd. I have something very different at heart. When I spoke of your future just now, Constance, it was to tell you that I have come here, to-night, to ask you to be my wife—to say to you that I love you devotedly and cannot live without you. This is my errand. It is not friendship I offer, it is not pity, it is not esteem for your gentle, strong soul, it is passionate human love."
He paused and there was profound silence in the darkened room where they could scarcely see each other's faces. Constance trembled like a leaf. In a moment the whole card-board house of sisterly affection fell about her ears, and she knew the truth. These were the sweetest words she had ever listened to, though they stabbed her like a knife. "Oh!" she whispered, "Oh!"
"Is it such a surprise, Constance?" he murmured, ascribing her accents of dismay to that source. "You must have known you were very dear to me."