Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-70.djvu/290

282 She retreated with a gesture as if pushing him back with both her hands. It seemed impossible to stay near him and not look up, yet to look up would have been to show him too much; for at his words she was sweetly and powerfully thrilled.

"You do not see the light in which I look at my own actions," she now exclaimed. "It was certainly I who forced you against your will to tell me that you cared for me."

"Against my will? Much you know about my will. Until a man speaks, especially a man who feels that he is offering what is unequal, he has a thousand dubitations, but when he has spoken, and when he has had the answer he longs for, hesitations are at an end. You were to ask your aunt's permission for our engagement. Fate has returned this answer. I love you so well I could have accepted, at least for a time, a share of wealth to devote to your happiness. It would have been pleasant to live in luxury with you. That I will admit. But rather than not live with you at all, I would freeze with you, starve with you."

"Thank you. A girl who loves you will not let you freeze and starve on her account."

Basil laughed. "Luckily, there is no particular question of freezing or starving. I do not promise you the smoothest road in the world, but it shall be made as smooth as I can make it, and if we are together—Ethel, dear, I love you so that if I can say, 'Ethel is here whatever happens, you have Ethel, she is sure as heaven is sure,'—the hardest tasks will be easy."

Ethel had again retreated, had turned her back, had almost hidden herself. She remembered afterwards with a keen sense of mortification that for a moment his words, his voice, had moved her almost to helplessness. She had had to make an almost fierce clutch at herself, had had to tell herself anew that there are moments in life when we must not yield, when we must struggle if we would live. She had turned away that she might not meet his eyes, appealing, caressing, arraigning, and that he might not see the rush of blood to her face, that she was suffocated by a lump in her throat. Why could he not understand? Why could not everybody understand? It seemed to Ethel so simple, so natural, so inevitable, that she should decide on a certain course. When she finally turned back to him, although her color still came and went, she had regained her self-command, and said with a manner which had no little charm, but which had also a touch of audacity,—

"Let me explain that I am invited to Riverbend." As she said this there came a little smile in her eyes, the play of a dimple in her cheek. "I have accepted the invitation. I am to go on the 18th."

Basil meanwhile had not been growing cooler or more logical. The girl's attitude of revolt, her play of color, the glance of her eye, always