"Do you know," she said with great relief, "that I always felt that 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 art--even _your_ art, which I might learn to care for. All I want is to really live and have your troubles to meet and overcome them because I will not permit anything to harm you.... I will love you enough for that.... I--do you love other women?" "Good God, no!"