“My Beatrice, you cannot think that I would ask you for your love without hoping to marry you?”
She did not laugh, speaking the words. He could see that she would not hesitate to marry him at any moment.
“Would to heaven that we could be, my dearest! But could there be anything more cruel than for a penniless man, such as I am, to ask a girl, such as you are, to marry him?”
“I cannot see where the cruelty would be. People have been very happy together before now, though they have had very little money between them.”
“My dear Beatrice, you were not meant to pass your life in squalid lodgings, with none of the refinements of life around you; and I--well, I have known what roughing it means; I would face the worst alone; but I am not selfish enough to seek to drag you down to my level--to ask you to face hardship for my sake.”
“Do not say anything, darling: anything that you may say will only make it the harder to part. I can do it, Beatrice; I am strong enough to say good-bye.”
She stood facing him, with her wonderful eyes looking steadily into his. The message that they conveyed to him was such as he could not fail to read aright. He knew that if he had said goodbye, he would never have a chance of looking into those eyes again.
And yet he made the attempt to speak--to say the word that she had challenged him to utter. His lips were parted for more than a moment. He suddenly dropped her hand--he had been holding it all the time--and turned away from her with a passionate gesture.
“I cannot say it--God help me! I cannot say good-bye,” he cried.
He had flung himself into a sofa and had buried his face in his hands.
For a short time he had actually felt that he was desirous to part from her. For some minutes he had been quite sincere. The force of the words he had made use of to show Beatrice how absolutely necessary it was that they should part, had not been felt by her; those words had, however, affected him. He had felt--for the first time, in spite of his previous self-communing--that he must say good-bye to her, but he found that he was too weak to say it.
He felt a hand upon his shoulder. He could feel her gracious presence near to him, before her voice came.
“Harold,” she said, “if you had said it, I should never have had an hour’s happiness in my life. I would never have seen you again. I felt that all the happiness of my life was dependent upon your refraining from speaking those words. Cannot you see, my love, that the matter has passed out of our hands--that it is out of our power to part now? Harold, cannot you see that, let it be for good or evil--for heaven or doom--we must be together? Whatever is before us, we are not two but one--our lives are joined beyond the power of separation. I am yours; you are mine.”