“Is it because you are married?” he demanded.
She grew crimson.
“Isn't that an unnecessary question?”
“No,” he declared. “It concerns me vitally to understand you. You were good enough to wish that I should find happiness. I have found the possibility of it—in you.”
“Oh,” she cried, “don't say such things!”
“Have you found happiness?” he asked.
She turned her face from him towards their shining wake. But he had seen that her eyes were filled with sudden tears.
“Forgive me,” he pleaded; “I did not mean to be brutal. I said that because I felt as I have never in my life felt before. As I did not know I could feel. I can't account for it, but I ask you to believe me.”
“I can account for it,” she answered presently, with a strange gentleness. “It is because you met me at a critical time. Such-coincidences often occur in life. I happened to be a woman; and, I confess it, a woman who was interested. I could not have been interested if you had been less real, less sincere. But I saw that you were going through a crisis; that you might, with your powers, build up your life into a splendid and useful thing. And, womanlike, my instinct was to help you. I should not have allowed you to go on, but—but it all happened so quickly that I was bewildered. I—I do not understand it myself.”
He listened hungrily, and yet at times with evident impatience.