"Not now, please.... Sit there where you were.... I can tell you better--all I know--about it."
She bent again over her needle, sewing half blindly, the hurrying pulses making her hand unsteady. After he was seated she turned her head partly around for a moment, looking at him with a fascinated and almost breathless curiosity.
"If I tell you, you will come no nearer; will you?" she asked.
She sewed for a while at random, not conscious what her fingers were doing, striving to think clearly in the menace of these new emotions, the power of which she was divining now, realizing more deeply every second.
"I'll try to tell you," she said: "I didn't know anything--about myself--this morning. What we had been to each other I considered friendship. Remember it was my first friendship with a man. And--I thought it _was_ that."
After a silence: "Was it anything deeper?" he asked.
"Yes, deeper.... You frightened me at first.... I was hurt.... But not ashamed or angry. And I did not understand why.... Until you spoke and said--what you said."
"Yes.... After that things grew slowly clearer to me. I don't know what I said to you--half the things I said on the way back--only that I made you angry--and I continued, knowing that you were angry and that I--I was almost laughing--I don't know why--only that I needed time to try to think.... You can't understand, can you?"
She looked up, then bowed her head once more.
"That is all," she said under her breath.
"Only that--after you had gone away this afternoon I began to be a little in love."
His clasped hands tightened on his knees; he said in a low unsteady voice: "All my heart is yours, Karen--all there is in me of love and loyalty, honour and devotion, is yours. Into my mind there is no thought that comes which is not devoted to you or influenced by my adoration of you. I love you--every word you utter, every breath you draw, every thought you think I love. The most wonderful thing in the world would be that you should love me; the greatest miracle that you might marry me. Dare I hope for you, Karen?"
In the tremulous silence she turned again and looked at him, bending very low over her work.
"I mean--considerate--at first.... There is a great deal I don't know about men--and being in love with one of them.... Brought up as I have been, I could not understand that you should take me--in your arms.... I was not angry--not even ashamed.... Only, never having thought of it--and taking it for granted that, among people of your caste and mine, to touch a man's lips was an act--of betrothal--perhaps of marriage----"