"But so to take in a near-sighted old gentleman who goes out of his mind trying to remember any of the thousand faces he sees in a year of lectures—ah, it was too bad. Why didn't you tell me?"
"I was trying to get made over," I said. "And I'm not made over yet. You had no right to find me out! How did you find me out?"
"I went to that gallery," he explained, "yesterday. And there I saw Gerald Massy's portrait of you—and underneath he has, you know, set 'Cosma.' I have never forgotten that name—how could I? So I came galloping home to accuse you. And there sat Mrs. Carney calling you 'Cosma,' before my eyes. What I can't understand," he ended savagely, "is how I can have been so dumb. Now, tell me—tell me!"
We were walking in the road, which had somehow assumed a docile and appeased look, like something which we were stroking as it was meant to be stroked. And I told him the rest, beginning with the hour that he had left me in Twiney's pasture. And so we came to Twiney's pasture again.
We broke through the wet sedge, and went over the fence as we had gone that other morning. And presently we stood at the top of the hill from which he had first shown me the whole world.
Then I did my best to tell him. "Mr. Ember!" I said, "all the little bit I've been able to make out of myself, you've made. I want to tell you that—and I'm not telling it at all!" I cried.
He stood as he had stood before, with the sky's great blue behind him. And he said:
"Then just don't bother with it. Besides, I've something far more important to try to say to you—the best I know how. Cosma—will you marry me?"
In those first days, I had sometimes dreamed of his saying that—dreamed it hopelessly; but sometimes, too, I had sunk warm in the thought of it, as if there all thought had come home. Yet now, when he actually said it, it came to me with a great shock. And out of the fulness of what I suddenly read in my heart, I answered him:
"Why, I can't marry you," I said. "I can't give up my work with you!"