“Don’t you love me then, my wife?” he asked slowly, in a voice so sweet, so thrilling, that Nouna listened to the words just as she had done to his singing. “If you do you cannot be anything but happy, for you are the very breath of my life to me; to be with you is happiness enough for me; and just as your body is mine now to cherish and defend, so your very soul shall become a part of mine, and my joy in you shall be your joy, till every pleasure I feel shall thrill through you, and every distinction I win shall make you glow with pride.” She watched his face with all seriousness as he spoke, and then shook her head. “I love you,” she said, “but not in your way.” “You don’t know me yet. A woman’s love grows more slowly than a man’s, more reasonably, perhaps; but you will learn to love me as I wish, you can’t help yourself, I will be so good to you. You are only a child. I can wait.” “Ah,” she said, half sorrowfully, half amused. “There is where you are wrong. If I were English, I should perhaps be still a child. But I’m not; I’m a woman.” She looked at him steadily, in deep earnest, stopping in her play with her white sash, and shaking her hair free from his touch to impress upon him that he must listen to her with attention. “You think I shall be something different by and by. Perhaps I shall; I never know what I am going to be, or what I am going to do. But I do know I shall never be what you want--always the same, always loving. I never love anybody without hating them too sometimes. Sometimes I hate Sundran, and often Mammy Ellis, and I shall hate you when you frown at me.” “But I sha’n’t frown at you.” “Yes, you will. You’ll frown when I long for more jewellery, when I say I hate England and wish I was back in India; and you’ll frown more when I forget that I’m married and laugh and amuse myself just as I used to do.” “I shouldn’t like you to forget you are my wife, certainly,” said George, troubled for a moment. “But then I won’t give you much chance of forgetting it, my darling.”