“You love me too much,” he said in a low voice, half oppressed, half excited by her words, for men are difficult to content.  The love of women given in excess of their demand embarrasses and maybe chills them; and Edgar had a sudden misgiving, discomposing if quite natural, which appeared, as it were, to check him like a horse in mid-career and throw him back on himself disagreeably.  He asked himself doubtfully, Should he be able to answer this intense love so as to make the balance even between them?  He loved her dearly, passionately—­better than he had ever loved any woman of the many before—­but he did not love her like this:  he knew that well enough.

“I cannot love you too much,” said Leam.  “You are my life, and you are so great.”

“And you will never tire of me?”

She looked into his face, her beautiful eyes worshiping him.  “Do we tire of the sun?” she answered.

“Where did you get all your pretty fancies from, my darling?” he cried.  “You have developed into a poet as well as a Psyche.”

“Have I?  If I have developed into anything, it is because I love you,” she answered, with her sweet pathetic smile.

“But, my Leam, sweetheart—­”

“Ah,” she interrupted him with a look of passionate delight, “how I like to hear you call me that!  Mamma used to call me her heart.  No one else has since—­I would not let any one if they had wanted—­till now you.”

“And you are my heart,” he answered fervently—­“the heart of my heart, my very life!”

“Am I?” she smiled.  “And you are mine.”

“But, sweetheart, tell me if, when you know me better, you do not find me all you think me now, what then?  Will you hate me for very disappointment?”

He asked the question, but as if he believed in himself and the impossibility of her hatred or disappointment while he asked it.

She looked at him with naive incredulity and surprise.  It would have been a challenge to be kissed from any other woman, but Leam, with her fire and passion and personal reticence all in one, had no thought of offering such a challenge, still less of submitting to its consequences.

“Find you all I think?” she repeated slowly.  “When I know the saints in heaven, will not they be all I think?  Was not Columbus?”

“But I am neither a saint nor a hero,” said Edgar, drawing a sprig of lemon-plant which he held in his hand lightly across her face.

“You are both,” answered Leam as positively as she used to answer Alick about the ugliness of England and the want of flowers in the woods and hedges, and with as much conviction of her case.

“And you are an angel,” he returned.

“No,” said Leam quietly, “I am only the woman who loves you.”

“Ah, but you must not depreciate yourself for my sake,” he said.  “My choice, my love, my wife, must be perfect for my own honor.  You must respect me in respecting yourself, and if you were to say yes indeed you were an angel, that would only be what is due to me.  Don’t you see?” pleasantly.