MORELL (quite overcome, kneeling beside her chair and embracing her with boyish ingenuousness). It's all true, every word. What I am you have made me with the labor of your hands and the love of your heart! You are my wife, my mother, my sisters: you are the sum of all loving care to me. CANDIDA (in his arms, smiling, to Eugene). Am I YOUR mother and sisters to you, Eugene? MARCHBANKS (rising with a fierce gesture of disgust). Ah, never. Out, then, into the night with me! CANDIDA (rising quickly and intercepting him). You are not going like that, Eugene? MARCHBANKS (with the ring of a man's voice--no longer a boy's--in the words). I know the hour when it strikes. I am impatient to do what must be done. MORELL (rising from his knee, alarmed). Candida: don't let him do anything rash. CANDIDA (confident, smiling at Eugene). Oh, there is no fear. He has learnt to live without happiness. MARCHBANKS. I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than that. Parson James: I give you my happiness with both hands: I love you because you have filled the heart of the woman I loved. Good-bye. (He goes towards the door.) CANDIDA. One last word. (He stops, but without turning to her.) How old are you, Eugene? MARCHBANKS. As old as the world now. This morning I was eighteen. CANDIDA (going to him, and standing behind him with one hand caressingly on his shoulder). Eighteen! Will you, for my sake, make a little poem out of the two sentences I am going to say to you? And will you promise to repeat it to yourself whenever you think of me? MARCHBANKS (without moving). Say the sentences. CANDIDA. When I am thirty, she will be forty-five. When I am sixty, she will be seventy-five. MARCHBANKS (turning to her). In a hundred years, we shall be the same age. But I have a better secret than that in my heart. Let me go now. The night outside grows impatient. CANDIDA. Good-bye. (She takes his face in her hands; and as he divines her intention and bends his knee, she kisses his forehead. Then he flies out into the night. She turns to Morell, holding out her arms to him.) Ah, James! (They embrace. But they do not know the secret in the poet's heart.)