"You were only a little girl then, hardly thirteen, and yet to me, Virginia, you were a woman capable of the deepest feeling. I never shall forget how you rebuked me about leaving my mother in anger. You looked at me as straight and frank as starbeams, and told me you’d not desert your mother in her old age for all the world. I never forgot what you said and just the way you said it, and through all my turbulent life out West your lecture was constantly before me. I was angry at my mother, but finally I got to looking at her marriage differently, and then I began to want to see her and to do my filial duty as you were doing yours. That was one reason I came back here. The other was because—Virginia, it was because I wanted to see _you_." "Oh, don’t, don’t begin—" but Virginia’s protest died away in her pulsing throat. She lowered her head and covered her hot face with her hands. "But I have begun, and I must go on," he said. "Out West I met hundreds of attractive women, but I could never look upon them as other men did because of the—the picture of you stamped on my brain. I was not hearing a word about you, but you were becoming exactly what I knew you would become; and when I saw you out there in the barn-yard that first day after I got back, my whole being caught fire, and it’s blazing yet—it will blaze as long as there is a breath of my life left to fan it. For me there can be but one wife, little girl, and if she fails me I’ll go unmarried to my grave." "Oh, don’t! don’t!" Virginia sobbed, her tones muffled by her hands pressed tightly over her face. "You don’t know me. I’m not what you think I am. I’m only a poor, helpless, troubled—" "Don’t! don’t!" he broke in, fearfully—"don’t decide against me hastily! I know—God knows I am unworthy of you, and if you don’t feel as I do you will never link your young life to mine. Sometimes I fear that your shrinking from me as you often do is evidence against my hopes. Oh, dear, little girl, am I a fool? Am I a crazy idiot asking you for what you can’t possibly give?" A sob which she was trying to suppress shook her from head to foot, and she rose and stepped to the door and stood there looking out on the moonlit road, where his impatient horse was pawing the earth and neighing. There was silence. King leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his strong fingers locked like prongs of steel in front of him, his face deep cut with the chisel of anxiety. For several minutes he stared thus at her white profile struck into sharp clearness by the combined light from without and within. "I see it all," he groaned. "I’ve lost. While I was away out there treasuring your memory and seeing your face night after night, day after day—holding you close, pulling these rugged old mountains about you for protection, you were not—you were not—I was simply not in your thoughts." Then she turned towards him. She seemed to have grown older and stronger since he began speaking so earnestly.