He weighed all the pros and cons; he was no boy to call the recklessness of self-indulgence the splendour of devotion. He balanced the arguments on either side long and carefully. If he asked her to come to him, it should be with the conviction he was doing her no wrong. He saw how easy it would be to deceive himself, to feel persuaded that the fact of her being in a situation made matrimony an advance to her, whether she married well or ill. He would not act impatiently and perhaps spoil her life. But he was very impatient. Through months he used to come away from the Lodge striving to discern importance in some answer she had made him, some question she had put to him. It appeared to him that he had loved her much longer than he had; and he had made no progress. There were moments when he upbraided himself for being clumsy and stupid; some men in his place, he thought, would have divined long ago what her feelings were. He never queried the wisdom of marrying her on his own account; the privilege of cherishing her in health and nursing her in sickness, of having her head pillowed on his breast, and confiding his hopes to her sympathy; of going through life with her in a union in which she would give to him all her sacred and withheld identity, looked to him a joy for which he could never be less than intensely grateful while life endured. He ceased to marvel at the birth of his love, it looked natural now; she seemed to belong to Westport so wholly by this time. He no longer contrasted the present atmosphere of the villa with the duller atmosphere that she had banished. He had forgotten that duller atmosphere. She was there--it was as if she had always been there. To reflect that there had been a period when he had known no Mary Brettan was strange. He wondered that he had not felt the want of her. The day that he had met her in Corri's office appeared to him dim in the mists of at least five years. The exterior of the man, and the yearnings within him--Kincaid as he knew himself, and the doctor as he was known to the hospital--were so at variance that the incongruity would have been ludicrous if it had not been beautiful.