“Io!”
“Ah! I didn’t mean to say that. It came back to me, Ban. Perhaps it’s true. Do I know you?”
As in the long ago he answered her: “Are you afraid of me?”
“Of everything. Of the future. Of what I don’t know in you.”
“There’s nothing of me that you don’t know,” he averred.
“Isn’t there?” She was infinitely wistful; avid of reassurance. Before he could answer she continued: “That night in the rain when I first saw you, under the flash, as I see you now—Ban, dear, how little you’ve changed, how wonderfully little, to the eye!—the instant I saw you, I trusted you.”
“Do you trust me now?” he asked for the delight of hearing her declare it.
Instead he heard, incredulously, the doubt in her tone. “Do I? I want to—so much! I did then. At first sight.”
He set down the lamp. She could hear him breathing quick and stressfully. He did not speak.
“At first sight,” she repeated. “And—I think—I loved you from that minute. Though of course I didn’t know. Not for days. Then, when I’d gone, I found what I’d never dreamed of; how much I could love.”