"O God, but you're lovely!" he said in a half-smothered and shamefaced sort of whisper.
"_Verboten!_" I reminded him. "And not so much the cussing, Peter, as the useless compliments."
He said nothing to that, but once more sat staring out over the twilight prairie for quite a long time. When he spoke again it was in a quieter and much more serious tone.
"I suppose I may as well tell you," he said without looking at me, "that I've come into a pretty clear understanding of the situation here at Alabama Ranch."
"It's kind of a mix-up, isn't it?" I suggested, with an attempt at lightness.
"I've been wondering how long you're going to wait," he observed, apparently as much to himself as to me.
"For what you call your mix-up to untangle," was his answer.
"There's nothing for me to do but to wait," I reminded him.
"You can't waste your life, you know, doing that," he quietly protested.
"What else can I do?" I asked, disturbed a little by the absence of color from his face, apparent even in that uncertain light.
"Nothing's suggested itself, I suppose?" he ventured, after a silence.
"Nothing that prompts me into any immediate action," I told him. "You see, Peter, I'm rather anchored by three little hostages down in that little shack there!"
That left him silent for another long and brooding minute or two.
"I suppose you've wondered," he finally said, "why I've stuck around here as long as I have?"
I nodded, not caring to trust myself to words, and then, realizing I was doing the wrong thing, I shook my head.
"It's because, from the morning you found me in that mud-hole, I've just wanted to be near you, to hear your voice when you spoke, to see the curve of your lips and the light come and go in your eyes when you laugh," were the words that came ever so slowly from Peter. "I've wanted that so much that I've let about everything else in life go hang. Yet in a way, and in my own world, I'm a man of some little importance. I've been cursed with enough money, of course, to move about as I wish, and loaf as I like. But that sort of life isn't really living. I'm not in the habit, though, of wanting the things I can't have. So what strikes me as the tragic part of it all is that I couldn't have met and known you when you were as free as I am now. In a way, you _are_ free, or you ought to be. You're a woman, I think, with arrears of life to make up. You've struck me, from the very first, as too alive, too sensitive, too responsive to things, to get the fullest measure out of life by remaining here on the prairie, in what are, after all, really pioneer conditions. You've known the other kind of life, as well as I have, and it will always be calling to you. And if that call means anything to you, and the--the change we've spoken of is on its way, or for some unexpected reason has to come, I'm--well, I'm going to take the bit in my teeth right here and tell you that I love you more than you imagine and a good deal more, I suppose, than the law allows!"