“No,” said Easton, with a passionate force that nothing could have stayed, “you know I love you!”
Her dark bloom went, but in an instant came again, with what swiftly blended emotions no man may guess and possibly no woman could tell, and “How can you say such a thing to me?” she demanded with the imperiousness of fear. “You—you hardly know me—it’s hardly a week since we met.”
“A week? What does it matter? I have never loved any other woman; I know that you are free to love me, if you can; I don’t care for any other knowledge of you. Oh, don’t answer me yet! Listen: I don’t ask you to love me now; what right have I to do that? But only let me love you! I can wait. I can be silent, if you say so. You are my whole life, and my whole life is yours, if you choose to make me wait so long. How could it be better spent?”
She sank down upon a shelf of rock beside that she had leaned upon, and he fell at her feet, and then with the unsparingness of love which claims nothing and takes all, “Oh, my darling!” he murmured, and stretched his arms toward her.
She stayed him with a little electric touch. “Don’t!” she whispered, and after a look at him she hid her face.
He did not move; his attitude did change, but still expressed his headlong hope, as if a sculptor had caught it in immutable stone; but when she drew out his handkerchief and, pressing it to her eyes, handed it to him and said, with trembling lips, “Take it; give me my book,” a terrible despair blanched his face.
“Oh!” he moaned.
“Yes,” she said, “I must be free. I can’t think if I’m not free;” and she put the book, which he mechanically surrendered, into her pocket.
“You shall be as free of me as you will,” he answered. “I ask nothing of you—only leave to love you. I will go away, if you say it. I must be to blame for speaking, if it gives you so much pain. I would rather have died than hurt you.”
An imploring humility, an ineffable tenderness evoked by her trouble, shook his voice. She did not answer at once, but, “You are not to blame; I should be very ungrateful and very cruel to suffer it,” she said, after a while, “but, oh, I’m afraid that I must have been behaving very badly, very boldly, to make you talk so to me, so soon. I’m afraid,” she said, bowing her head, “that you don’t respect me—that you think I was trying to make you care for me.”