Even now he had to marshal his thoughts for a moment before he could go on.  It was too ridiculous, that look of tragic desperation she wore while she waited!  He averted his eyes and began rather deliberately.

“You are dearer to me now—­at this moment, as we sit here—­than ever you’ve been before.  I think that’s the simple literal truth.  This matter of forgiveness—­of your having done something to forfeit or to destroy my—­love for you...  Oh, it’s too wildly off the facts to be dealt with rationally!  I owe you my life.  That’s not a sentimental exaggeration.  Even Steinmetz says so.  And you saved it for me at the end of a period of weeks—­months I guess—­when I had been devoting most of my spare energies to torturing you.  Myself, incidentally, but there was nothing meritorious about that.  In an attempt to assert a—­proprietary right in you that you had never even pretended to give me.  That I’d once promised you I never would assert.  The weight of obligation I’m under to you would be absolutely crushing—­if it weren’t for one thing that relieves me of it altogether.  The knowledge that you love me.  That you did it all for the love of me.”

She moved no nearer him.  These were words.  There was no reassurance for her in them.  One irrepressible movement of his hands toward her, the mere speaking of her name in a voice warmed by the old passion, would have brought her, rapturous, to his knees.

“There’s no such thing as a successful pretense between us, I know,” he said.  “So I’ll talk plainly.  I’m glad to.  I know what it is you miss in me.  It’s gone.  Temporarily I suppose, but gone as if it had never been.  That’s a—­physiological fact, Paula.”

She flushed hotly at that and looked away from him.

“I don’t know exactly what a soul is,” he went on.  “But I do know that a body—­the whole of the body—­is the temple of it.  It impenetrates everything; is made up of everything.  Well, this illness of mine has, for these weeks, made an old man of me.  And I’m grateful to it for giving me a chance to look ahead, before it’s too late.  I want to make the most of it.  Because you see, my dear, in ten years—­or thereabouts—­the course of nature will have made of me what this pneumonia has given me a foretaste of.  Ten years.  You will be—­forty, then.”

She was gazing at him now, fascinated, in unwilling comprehension.  “I hate you to talk like that,” she said.  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

“It’s important,” he told her crisply.  “You’ll see that in a minute, if you will wait.  Before very long—­in a month or so, perhaps—­I shall be, I suppose, pretty much the same man I was—­three months ago.  Busy at my profession again.  In love with you again.  All my old self-assurance back; the more arrogant if it isn’t quite the real thing.  So now’s the time, when the fogs one moves about in have lifted and the horizon is sharp, to take some new bearings.  And set a new course by them.  For both of us.