"But there _is_ something I should like to tell you. I know that I behaved that night as if--as if I hadn't come to ask you--what I have; I don't blame you for not trusting me now. But it is no use to tell you what I intended if it is all over." He looked down into his hat, and she said in a low voice, "I think I ought to know. Won't you--sit down?" He sat down again. "Then I will tell you at the risk of--But there's nothing left to lose! You know how it is, when we think about a person or a place before we've seen them: we make some sort of picture of them, and expect them to be like it. I don't know how to say it; you do look more like what I thought than you did at first. I suppose I must seem a fool to say it; but I thought you were tall, and that you were--well!--rather masterful--" "Like Juliet Bingham?" she suggested, with a gleam in the eye next him. "Yes, like Juliet Bingham. It was your voice made me think--it was your voice that first made me want to see you, that made me write to you, in the beginning. I heard you talking that night in the hotel, where you left that circular; you were in the room next to mine; and I wanted to come right up here then; but I had to go back to New York, and so I wrote to you. When your letters came, I always seemed to hear you speaking in them." "And when you saw me you were disappointed. I knew it." "No; not disappointed--" "Why not? My voice didn't go with my looks; it belonged to a tall, strong-willed girl." "No," he protested. "As soon as I got away it was just as it always had been. I mean that your voice and your looks went together again." "As soon as you got away?" the girl questioned. "I mean--What do you care for it, anyway!" he cried, in self-scornful exasperation. "I know," she said thoughtfully, "that my voice isn't like me; I'm not good enough for it. It ought to be Juliet Bingham's--" "No, no!" he interrupted, with a sort of disgust that seemed not to displease her, "I can't imagine it!" "But we can't any of us have everything, and she's got enough as it is. She's a head higher than I am, and she wants to have her way ten times as bad." "I didn't mean that," Langbourne began. "I--but you must think me enough of a simpleton already." "Oh, no, not near," she declared. "I'm a good deal of a simpleton myself at times." "It doesn't matter," he said desperately; "I love you." "Ah, that belongs to the time when you thought I looked differently." "I don't want you to look differently. I--" "You can't expect me to believe that now. It will take time for me to do that." "I will give you time," he said, so simply that she smiled. "If it was my voice you cared for I should have to live up to it, somehow, before you cared for me. I'm not certain that I ever could. And if I couldn't? You see, don't you?" "I see that I was a fool to tell you what I have," he so far asserted himself. "But I thought I ought to be honest." "Oh, you've been _honest_!" she said.