"Your wife?" she said at last. "My dear, you've only known me ten days." "It makes no difference." He took her hand in his and kissed it, bowing his head. She twisted herself away from him, and drew back her face from his. They rose. "Ah," she said, "you're cold. You don't know how. Let me look at you. It's not me you want. You want a mother for your children." "Not I. I want you--you--for myself." She moved toward him with a low cry, and he took her in his arms and stood still by her without a word. And to his joy, she whom he held (gently, lest he should hurt her) laid her face to his face, and held him with a grip tighter than his own, as if she feared that he would loose himself and leave her. Her eyes closed as he kissed her forehead, and opened as her mouth found his. Then she drew herself slowly from him. "You love me then?" she said. "Yes, Kitty, I love you." CHAPTER XII The awkward thing was telling Jane about it. Jane had been his dead wife's friend before he married her, and she had known her better then than she knew Kitty. Yet he remembered, acutely, how he had gone to her eight years ago, and told her that he was going to marry Amy, and how she had kissed him and said nothing, and how, when he asked her if she had any objection, she had said "No, none. But isn't it a little sudden?" He wondered how Jane would look when he told her he was going to marry Kitty. That was bound to strike her as very sudden indeed. It was wonderful to him that this thing should have happened to him. He was aware that it was a new thing. Nothing in his previous experience had prepared him for it. He had been very young eight years ago, and a gayer, lighter-hearted chivalry had gone to his courtship of poor Amy. Poor Amy, though he would not own it, had been a rather ineffectual woman, with a prodigious opinion of her small self and a fretting passion for dominion. She had had a crowd of friends and relations whom she had allowed to come between them. Poor Amy had never understood him. There were heights and depths in him to which she had made no appeal. But Kitty--she had brought something out of him that had been hidden and unknown to him before. Something that answered to the fear with which she had drawn back from him and to the tremendous and tragic passion with which she had given herself to him at the last. Poor little Amy had never held him so. She had never loved him like that in all her poor little life. And so his very tenderness for Kitty had terror in it, lest he should fail her, lest he should in any way justify her prescience of disaster. Somebody was coming along the Cliff-path, somebody with a telegram for Mrs. Tailleur. She rose, moving away from Lucy as she opened it. "There is no answer," she said. And she came to him again and sat beside him, very still, with hands spread over the telegram that lay open in her lap. "Has anything happened?"