“I don't know how much longer you are going to stay,” she said. “You have not been abroad before, and there are other places you ought to go.”
“I'll get you to make out an itinerary.”
“Peter, can't you see that I'm serious? I have decided to take matters in my own hands. The rest of the time you are here, you may come to see me twice a week. I shall instruct the concierge.”
He turned and grasped the mantel shelf with both hands, and touched the log with the toe of his boot.
“What I told you about seeing Paris may be called polite fiction,” he said. “I came over here to see you. I have been afraid to say it until to-day, and I am afraid to say it now.”
She sat very still. The log flared up again, and he turned slowly and looked at the shadows in her face.
“You-you have always been good to me,” she answered. “I have never deserved it—I have never understood it. If it is any satisfaction for you to know that what I have saved of myself I owe to you, I tell you so freely.”
“That,” he said, “is something for which God forbid that I should take credit. What you are is due to the development of a germ within you, a development in which I have always had faith. I came here to see you, I came here because I love you, because I have always loved you, Honora.”
“Oh, no, not that!” she cried; “not that!”
“Why not?” he asked. “It is something I cannot help, something beyond my power to prevent if I would. But I would not. I am proud of it, and I should be lost without it. I have had it always. I have come over to beg you to marry me.”