“There is nothing to forgive,” she replied, smiling. “I only regret that you have misconstrued my friendship into love.”
I was silent. These last words of hers crushed all hope from my soul. She sat with her hand trailing listlessly in the water, apparently intent upon the long rushes waving in the green depths below.
“Then,” I said in a disappointed voice, half-choked with emotion, “then you cannot love me, Eva, after all?”
“I did not say so,” she answered slowly, almost mechanically.
“What?” I cried joyously, again bending forward towards her. “Will you then try and love me—will you defer your answer until we know one another better? Say that you will.”
Again she shook her head with sorrowful air. She looked at me with a kind of mingled grief and joy, bliss embittered by despair.
“Why should I deceive you?” she asked. “Why, indeed, should you deceive yourself?”
“I do not deceive myself,” I protested, “I only know that I adore you; that you are the sole light of my life, and that I love you devotedly.”
“Ah! And in a month, perhaps, you will tell a similar story to some other woman,” she observed doubtingly. “Men are too often fickle.”
“I swear that I’ll never do that,” I declared. “My affairs of the heart have been few.”