“I see now—­yes, I think I see quite clearly—­that that’s why I struggled against your help, in the first place....  If it had been anybody else I should probably have taken it at once....  You must have thought me very foolish....  I suppose I was....  My only excuse is that it was something like—­like revolt—­first against the wrong we had been doing, and then against the great, sublime thing that was coming up out of the darkness to conquer me....  That’s the way I felt....  I was afraid....  I wanted something smaller—­something more conventional—­such as I’d been trained for....  It was only by degrees that I came to see that there were big things to live for—­as well as little....  It’s all so wonderful!—­so mysterious!  I can’t tell!...  I only know that now—­”

He withdrew his hand, looking troubled.

“Are you—­are you—­sure?”

She reflected a minute.  “I know what makes you ask that.  You think I’ve changed too suddenly.  If so, I can explain it.”

The silence in which he waited for her to continue assented in some sort to this reading of his thoughts.

“It isn’t that I’ve changed,” she said, at last, speaking thoughtfully, “so much as that I’ve wakened to a sense of what’s real for me as distinguished from what’s been forced and artificial.  You may understand me better if I say that in leading my life up to—­up to recently, I’ve been like a person at a play—­a play in which the situations are interesting and the characters sympathetic, but which becomes like a dream the minute you leave the theater and go home.  I feel that—­that with you—­I’ve—­I’ve got home.”

He would have said something, but she hurried on.

“I’ve not changed toward the play, except to recognize the fact that it was a play—­for me.  I knew it the instant I began to learn about papa’s troubles.  That was like a summons to me, like a call.  When it came, everything else—­the things I’d been taught to strive for and the people whom I had supposed to be the only ones worth living with, grew distant and shadowy, as though they belonged to a picture or a book.  It seemed to me that I woke then for the first time to a realization of the life going on about me here in my own country, and to a sense of my share in it.  If I hadn’t involved myself so much—­and involved some one else with me—­my duty would have been clearer from the start.  But Colonel Ashley’s been so noble!—­he’s understood me so well!—­he’s helped me so much to understand myself!—­that I can’t help honoring him, honoring him with my whole heart, even if I see now that I don’t—­that I never did—­care for him in the way—­”

She pressed her handkerchief to her lips to keep back what might have become a sob.

“Did you know I—­I loved you?” he asked, still speaking hoarsely.

“I thought you must,” she said, simply.  “I used to say I hoped you didn’t—­but deep down in my heart—­”