way
about love, because I never knew anything about it except from the
symptoms of Mr. Frawley? So when they told me that love and friendship
were different, I supposed it must be so, and I had no high opinion of
love ... until you made it so agreeable. Now I--I prefer it to anything
else.... I could sit here with you all day, listening to you. Tell me
some more."

XVI

[Illustration]

He did. She listened, sometimes intently interested, absorbed, sometimes
leaning back dreamily, her eyes partly veiled under silken lashes, her
mouth curved with the vaguest of smiles.

He spoke as a man who awakes with a start--not very clearly at first,
then with feverish coherence, at times with recklessness almost
eloquent. Still only half awakened himself, still scarcely convinced,
scarcely credulous that this miracle of an hour had been wrought in him,
here under the sky and setting sun and new-born leaves, he spoke not
only to her but of her to himself, formulating in words the rhythm his
pulses were beating, interpreting this surging tide which thundered in
his heart, clamoring out the fact--the fact--the fact that he
loved!--that love was on him like the grip of Fate--on him so suddenly,
so surely, so inexorably, that, stricken as he was, the clutch only
amazed and numbed him.

He spoke, striving to teach himself that the incredible was credible,
the impossible possible--that it was done! done! done! and that he loved
a woman in an hour because, in an hour, he had read her innocence as one
reads through crystal, and his eyes were opened for the first time upon
loveliness unspoiled, sweetness untainted, truth uncompromised.

"Do you know," she said, "that, as you speak, you make me care for you
so much more than I supposed a girl could care for a man?"

"Can you love me?"

"Oh, I do already! I don't mean mere love. It is something--_something_
that I never knew about before. _Every_thing about you is so--so exactly
what I care for--your voice, your head, the way you think, the way you
look at me. I never thought of men as I am thinking about you.... I want
you to belong to me--all alone.... I want to see how you look when you
are angry, or worried, or tired. I want you to think of me when you are
perplexed and unhappy and ill. Will you? You _must_! There is nobody
else, is there? If you do truly love me?"

"Nobody but you."

"That is what I desire.... I want to live with you--I promise I won't
talk about a