"But, Regina, I wish it! I want you to marry me!"
"Then you should have asked me before, when you first said you loved me, and I would have consented, to obtain the joy of giving myself to you. Now it is too much like paying a price, too much as if you felt obliged to offer me some reparation, too much as if I had led you into accepting gifts from me, knowing that you would feel bound in honour to pay for them afterwards. Marriage was not in your mind when you came here, not when you saw me, not when you desired me. You wished to go away and I persuaded you to stay. Yes, but not to obtain anything from you, Everest, only to give.... To give to you.... And, if you knew what supreme delight you have given me, what these hours in this garden have been to me, you would know there is no debt, no need for reparation.... If I have to pay with my life for them, which is quite possible, I am ready to pay."
Everest drew her close up to his breast, and held her there tightly.
"My sweet, don't say such things. As long as I am in the world, nothing shall ever hurt you. Say you will come up to town now, and marry me.... It will make me much happier."
He looked down on the radiant, light-crowned head pressed against his breast and thought again of the mortal Anchises when the goddess stooped to his kiss.
"Of course I will do anything you wish, if you continue to wish it, a little later, but not now. You shall not feel that, like Medea, I have thrown enchantment over you, and made you do what you never planned."
Everest was silent, lost in a maze of wondering thought. He saw he had been right in his estimation of Regina. She had not the ordinary modern mind, which measures everything by the standards of the world and of convention. She chose to do what she thought was right, and as it did not seem to her right to accept him she would not do so, overwhelming as the advantage to herself would be, horrible in its risks and dangers, its ruin, according to all worldly ideas, as her position without it now was. She had, as he had thought, just the soul of Regulus, who gave himself up to the Carthaginian tortures rather than speak a few words of false advice to Rome. How he admired her, loved her! He realised the greatness of her feelings towards him. She had perfect, absolute trust in him, as she had shown from the first. She was willing to pay the highest price herself for his love, and yet shield him from paying in the smallest coin. How different, how utterly different from all the women he had ever known! There was not one among those who had not fought and scrambled and clutched for self-advantage, self-gain—not one who, in spite of her love for him, would not have willingly sacrificed him to herself.
Regina, like her name, had come to him from Latin times.
He put his arm round her, and they sat down together, very close, sheltered by the laburnum, and the doves flew down, and walked, cooing, on the velvet moss at their feet. They talked of their plans, and Everest got her to promise this much, that if, when he had been away from her some time, living his own life, amongst his own people, if he then asked her again, perhaps she would consent to marry him.