"Love?"

"More. _You_."

"You never told me." That strange voice and averted face!

"How should I fancy you wouldn't know? I had never thought it out myself
until just now. It has simply been going on from day to day, as natural and
quiet as growing--" A bewildering illumination was spreading in her mind.
"Look here, young man"--she forced his face around to see it,--"what
goblins have you been hatching in the night-watches?" The raillery broke.
"Dear, is that what has been troubling you? Is there anything else?"

He looked at her now. "Anything else trouble me, if I really have you, and
a chance to do a little something for you?"

It was their apotheosis. They had never known a moment equal to it before;
could never know just another such again. In a very deep way it was the
first kiss of love for them both.

Bessie came back to herself with that sense of arriving, of having been
infinitely away, with which one drops from abstraction.

Where had they been in that state of absent mind?

It was as if they had met out of time, space, matter.... And as she thought
of his words, in the light of his eyes, pity too was qualified, and that
without endangering helpfulness. He, too, had his balance of good. Yes,
things squared in the end.