"Bessie!" he broke out impulsively, arising quickly and looking down into her upturned, intent face. "Doesn't everything we've just been talking about seem unimportant?"
Bessie's features expressed wonder and delightful anticipation.
"Beside ourselves, I mean," John went on, and then added impetuously: "To me, this afternoon, there is just one fact in the universe, Bessie, and that fact is YOU!"
The light of a shining happiness kindled like a flash on the girl's face, and she threw out her hands to him in the old impulsive way.
"Just one thing I feel," John rushed along, seizing the outstretched hands and playfully but tenderly lifting her until she stood before him, "just one thing that I want to do in the world above everything else, and that is to love you, Bessie, to love you!"
The words as he breathed them seemed to come up out of the deeps of a nature rich in knowledge of what such love could mean.
Bessie, her face enraptured, did not speak, but her dimples behaved skittishly, and there was a sharp little catch of her breath.
"Just one ambition stands out above every other," continued the man with a noble earnestness--"the ambition to make you happy--to protect you, to worship you, and to help you do the things you want to do in the world. For marriage isn't a selfish thing! It doesn't mean the extinction of a woman's career in order that a man may have his. It is the surrender of each to the other for the greater happiness and the higher power of both."
Suddenly a choke came in the big man's voice.
"That's what I feel, my dear girl," he concluded abruptly, with an excess of reverence in his tones, "and that's what I want to do!"
As he spoke, John had lifted her hands higher and higher till one rested on each of his shoulders. Man and woman, they looked straight into each other's eyes, as they had that day upon the cliff, but this time it was his lip that quivered and his eyes that misted over.
Bessie, sobered for a moment almost to a sense of unworthiness, as she felt all at once what it meant for a great-hearted man to so declare himself to a woman, saw something in that growing mist which impelled her to immediately reward the tenderness of such devotion with a frank confession of her own.