"Oh, don't! don't!" Virginia sobbed, her tones muffled by her hands pressed tightly over her face. "You don't know me. I'm not what you think I am. I'm only a poor, helpless, troubled—"
"Don't! don't!" he broke in, fearfully—"don't decide against me hastily! I know—God knows I am unworthy of you, and if you don't feel as I do you will never link your young life to mine. Sometimes I fear that your shrinking from me as you often do is evidence against my hopes. Oh, dear, little girl, am I a fool? Am I a crazy idiot asking you for what you can't possibly give?"
A sob which she was trying to suppress shook her from head to foot, and she rose and stepped to the door and stood there looking out on the moonlit road, where his impatient horse was pawing the earth and neighing. There was silence. King leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his strong fingers locked like prongs of steel in front of him, his face deep cut with the chisel of anxiety. For several minutes he stared thus at her white profile struck into sharp clearness by the combined light from without and within.
"I see it all," he groaned. "I've lost. While I was away out there treasuring your memory and seeing your face night after night, day after day—holding you close, pulling these rugged old mountains about you for protection, you were not—you were not—I was simply not in your thoughts."
Then she turned towards him. She seemed to have grown older and stronger since he began speaking so earnestly.
"You must not think of me that way any longer," she sighed. "You mustn't neglect your work to come to see me, either."
"You will never be my wife, then, Virginia?"
"No, I could never be that, Luke—no, not that—never on earth."
He shrank together as if in sudden, sharp physical pain, and then he rose to his full height and reached for his hat, which she had placed on the table. His heavy-soled boots creaked on the rough floor; he tipped his chair over, and it would have fallen had he not awkwardly caught it and restored it to its place.
"You have a good reason, I am sure of that," he said, huskily.