Page:E Nesbit - The Literary Sense.djvu/76

64 "I love you, dear—I love you," he repeated, and the words were oddly pleasant to say. "Won't you love me a little, too?"

She covered her face with her hands. She could no more have doubted him than she could have doubted the God to whom she had prayed night and morning for all these lonely years.

"Love you a little?" she said softly. "Ah! Robert, don't you know that I've loved you all my life?"

So a lie won what truth could not gain. And the odd thing is that the lie has now grown quite true, and he really believes that he has always loved her, just as he certainly loves her now. For some lies come true in the telling. But most of them do not, and it is not wise to try experiments.