“I will be glad of any love you can give me. But to say I should be _content_ with _any_ love you could give me, would be false. My love for you is such, I don’t know how to bear it! It aches so! My heart is full of you, and longs for you till I can hardly endure the pain. You are so beautiful that your beauty burns me. Night nor day can I forget you!” “You try to forget me then?” “Never. Your eyes have so dazzled my soul that I can see nothing but your eyes. Do look at me--just for one moment, Lufa.” She turned her face and looked him straight in the eyes--looked into them as if they were windows through which she could peer into the convolutions of his brain. She held her eyes steady until his dropped, unable to sustain the nearness of her presence. “You see,” she said, “I am ready to do anything I can to please you!” He felt strangely defeated, rose, and sat down beside her again, with the sickness of a hot summer noon in his soul. But he must leave no room for mistake! He had been dreaming long enough! What had not Sefton told him! “Is it possible you do not understand, Lufa, what a man means when he says, ‘I love you’?” “I think I do! I don’t mind it!” “That means you will love me again?” “Yes; I will be good to you.” “You will love me as a woman loves a man?” “I will let you love me as much as you please.” “To love you as much as I please, would be to call you my own; to marry you; to say _wife_ to you; to have you altogether, with nobody to come between, or try to stop my worshiping of you--not father, not mother--nobody!” “Now you are foolish, Walter! You know I never meant that! You must have known that never _could_ be! I never imagined you could make such a fantastic blunder! But then how should _you_ know how _we_ think about things! I must remember that, and not be hard upon you!” “You mean that your father and mother would not like it?” “There it is! You do not understand! I thought so! I do not mean my father and mother in particular; I mean our people--people of our position--I would say _rank_, but that might hurt you! We are brought up so differently from you, that you can not understand how we think of such things. It grieves me to appear unkind, but really, Walter! There is not a man I love more than you--but marriage! _Lady Lufa_ would be in everybody’s mouth, the same as if I had run off with my groom! Our people are so blind that, believe me, they would hardly see the difference. The thing is simply impossible!” “It would not be impossible if you loved me!” “Then I don’t, never did, never could love you. Don’t imagine you can persuade me to anything unbecoming, anything treacherous to my people! You will find yourself awfully mistaken!” “But I may make myself a name! If I were as famous as Lord Tennyson, would it be just as impossible?”