you so, if for the first and last time, I--I--love you.

"Listen now," he went on, dropping his measured manner, and speaking
hurriedly, like a man with an earnest message and little time in which
to deliver it, "it is an odd thing, an incomprehensible thing, but
true, true--I fell in love with you the first time I saw your face. You
remember, you stood there leaning over the bulwark when I came on board
at Southampton, and as I walked up the gangway, I looked and my eyes met
yours. Then I stopped, and that stout old lady who got off at Madeira
bumped into me, and asked me to be good enough to make up my mind if I
were going backward or forward. Do you remember?"

"Yes," she answered in a low voice.

"Which things are an allegory," he continued. "I felt it so at the time.
Yes, I had half a mind to answer 'Backward' and give up my berth in
this ship. Then I looked at you again, and something inside of me said
'Forward.' So I came up the rest of the gangway and took off my hat
to you, a salutation I had no right to make, but which, I recall, you
acknowledged."

He paused, then continued: "As it began, so it has gone on. It is always
like that, is it not? The beginning is everything, the end must follow.
And now it has come out, as I was fully determined that it should not do
half an hour ago, when suddenly you developed eyes in the back of your
head, and--oh! dearest, I love you. No, please be quiet; I have not
done. I have told you what I am, and really there isn't much more to say
about me, for I have no particular vices except the worst of them all,
idleness, and not the slightest trace of any virtue that I can discover.
But I have a certain knowledge of the world acquired in a long course of
shooting parties, and as a man of the world I will venture to give you a
bit of advice. It is possible that to you my life and death affair is
a mere matter of board-ship amusement. Yet it is possible also that you
might take another view of the matter. In that case, as a friend and a
man of the world, I entreat you--don't. Have nothing to do with me. Send
me about my business; you will never regret it."

"Are you making fun, or is all this meant, Mr. Seymour?" asked Benita,
still speaking beneath her breath, and looking straight before her.

"Meant? Of course it is meant. How can you ask?"

"Because I have always understood that on such occasions people wish to
make the best of themselves."

"Quite so, but I never do wh