I was overtaken with self-pity and began to snivel, “I can’t rest. You see? I can’t do anything.” She sat down beside me again and spoke softly. “I promise I will talk it all over with you again. When you are well. I promise I will meet you somewhere so that we can talk. You can’t talk now. “I asked you not to talk now. All you want to know you shall know... Will that do?” “I’d like to know” She looked round to see the door was closed, stood up and went to it. Then she crouched beside me and began whispering very softly and rapidly with her face close to me. “Dear,” she said, “I love you. If it will make you happy to marry me, I will marry you. I was in a mood just now—a stupid, inconsiderate mood. Of course I will marry you. You are my prince, my king. Women are such things of mood—or I would have behaved differently. We say ‘No’ when we mean ‘Yes’—and fly into crises. So now, Yes—yes—yes. I will. I can’t even kiss you. Give me your hand to kiss that. Understand, I am yours. Do you understand? I am yours just as if we had been married fifty years. Your wife—Beatrice. Is that enough? Now—now will you rest?” “Yes,” I said, “but why?” “There are complications. There are difficulties. When you are better you will be able to—understand them. But now they don’t matter. Only you know this must be secret—for a time. Absolutely secret between us. Will you promise that?” “Yes,” I said, “I understand. I wish I could kiss you.” She laid her head down beside mine for a moment and then she kissed my hand. “I don’t care what difficulties there are,” I said, and I shut my eyes. VII But I was only beginning to gauge the unaccountable elements in Beatrice. For a week after my return to Lady Grove I had no sign of her, and then she called with Lady Osprey and brought a huge bunch of perennial sunflowers and Michaelmas daisies, “just the old flowers there were in your room,” said my aunt, with a relentless eye on me. I didn’t get any talk alone with Beatrice then, and she took occasion to tell us she was going to London for some indefinite number of weeks. I couldn’t even pledge her to write to me, and when she did it was a brief, enigmatical, friendly letter with not a word of the reality between us. I wrote back a love letter—my first love letter—and she made no reply for eight days. Then came a scrawl: “I can’t write letters. Wait till we can talk. Are you better?”