"True love can never be small—it is always beautiful."
"That is my thought of it, too," I said; "but however much one wants to do the right thing, it is sometimes terribly hard to decide."
"I know," she said, "I know."
"Now suppose," I said, "that I loved a girl with all my heart—as I do," I added, thinking of Lucy, "but had never told her so; and suppose that her friends, for some foolish reason, did not like me, and wished her to devote her life to a calling which she herself had some leaning to——"
"Yes," she said, breathlessly, and I could see she was applying the case to herself.
"And suppose," I went on, "I had been blind in the past, and perhaps unknowingly allowed the time to go by when I should have spoken: would I be justified in coming into her life again, drawing her away from the peace that this calling might already have given her, and asking her to come back with me into the world where love is?"
For an instant she turned her head aside, and I saw the tears heavy under her eyelids.
"It would be for her to decide," she said; "you should tell her."
"That's just what my friend Lord St. Alleyne thinks," I said.
"You know him?" she cried. The look in her eyes at that moment was certainly not for me.