"I'm not going to lie to you, Pat. I regarded myself as free of all responsibility to her——"
"You're free of all responsibility to me," she choked. "Don't think that I want——"
"No. I am bound to you by the strongest tie I have ever known. I love you."
"You've loved a hundred other women," charged Pat, savagely revelling in her exaggeration.
"I've loved no one as I love you." Despite the banality of the words there was in his speech a quiet force that calmed and convinced her. "Not so that I ever wished to be free and marry."
"Of course," she said loftily, "there's no reason why I should be jealous of your past."
"It is your future that I have been jealous of always," he replied. "That is a thousand times harder to bear. And now I am asking you to give it to me."
"You'd do a dishonourable thing, a thing you consider dishonourable, to be free?" she asked.
"To marry you," he said doggedly. "Yes. There's nothing I'd stop at."