"I believe you do love me, as much as you possibly could love anything; and I believe that when you ask me to marry you you are performing the most generous act you ever have performed in the course of your life, or ever will; but, at the same time, if I had required your generosity, it would not have been shown me. If, when I got your letter a month ago, hinting at your willingness to marry me, I had at once written, imploring you to come, you would have read the letter. 'Poor little devil!' you would have said, and tore it up. The next week you would have sailed for Europe, and have sent me a check for a hundred and fifty pounds (which I would have thrown in the fire), and I would have heard no more of you."
The stranger smiled.
"But because I declined your proposal, and wrote that in three weeks I should be married to another, then what you call love woke up. Your man's love is a child's love for butterflies. You follow till you have the thing, and break it. If you have broken one wing, and the thing flies still, then you love it more than ever, and follow till you break both; then you are satisfied when it lies still on the ground."
"You are profoundly wise in the ways of the world; you have seen far into life," he said.
He might as well have sneered at the firelight.
"I have seen enough to tell me that you love me because you cannot bear to be resisted, and want to master me. You liked me at first because I treated you and all men with indifference. You resolved to have me because I seemed unattainable. This is all your love means."
He felt a strong inclination to stoop down and kiss the little lips that defied him; but he restrained himself. He said, quietly: "And you loved me--"
"Because you are strong. You are the first man I ever was afraid of.
And"--a dreamy look came into her face--"because I like to experience, I like to try. You don't understand that."
He smiled.
"Well, since you will not marry me, may I inquire what your intentions are, the plan you wrote of. You asked me to come and hear it, and I have come."
"I said, 'Come if you wish.' If you agree to it, well; if not, I marry on Monday."
"Well?"
She was still looking beyond him at the fire.
"I cannot marry you," she said slowly, "because I cannot be tied; but if you wish, you may take me away with you, and take care of me; then when we do not love any more we can say good-bye. I will not go down country," she added; "I will not go to Europe. You must take me to the Transvaal. That is out of the world. People we meet there we need not see again in our future lives."
"Oh, my darling," he said, bending tenderly, and holding his hand out to her, "why will you not give yourself entirely to me? One day you will desert me and go to another."
She shook her head without looking at him.
"No, life is too long. But I will go with you."
"When?"
"Tomorrow. I have told them that before daylight I go to the next farm. I will write from the town and tell them the facts. I do not want them to trouble me; I want to shake myself free of these old surroundings; I want them to lose sight of me. You can understand that is necessary for me."
He seemed lost in consideration; then he said:
"It is better to have you on those conditions than not at all. If you will have it, let it be so."
He sat looking at her. On her face was the weary look that rested there so often now when she sat alone. Two months had not passed since they parted; but the time had set its mark on her. He looked at her carefully, from the brown, smooth head to the little crossed feet on the floor. A worn look had grown over the little face, and it made its charm for him stronger.
For pain and time, which trace deep lines and write a story on a human face, have a strangely different effect on one face and another. The face that is only fair, even very fair, they mar and flaw; but to the face whose beauty is the harmony between that which speaks from within and the form through which it speaks, power is added by all that causes the outer man to bear more deeply the impress of the inner. The pretty woman fades with the roses on her cheeks, and the girlhood that lasts an hour; the beautiful woman finds her fullness of bloom only when a past has written itself on her, and her power is then most irresistible when it seems going.
From under their half-closed lids the keen eyes looked down at her. Her shoulders were bent; for a moment the little figure had forgotten its queenly bearing, and drooped wearily; the wide, dark eyes watched the fire very softly.
It certainly was not in her power to resist him, nor any strength in her that made his own at that moment grow soft as he looked at her.
He touched one little hand that rested on her knee.
"Poor little thing!" he said; "you are only a child."
She did not draw her hand away from his, and looked up at him.
"You are very tired?"
"Yes."
She looked into his eyes as a little child might whom a long day's play had saddened.
He lifted her gently up, and sat her on his knee.
"Poor little thing!" he said.
She turned her face to his shoulder, and buried it against his neck; he wound his strong arm about her, and held her close to him. When she had sat for a long while, he drew with his hand the face down, and held it against his arm. He kissed it, and then put it back in its old resting- place.
