’Deep on his front engraven
Deliberation sat, and public care—­’

quoted Wilfrid, with a little wrying of the lips.  ’This, you know, is one of the penalties of greatness.’

She seemed about to rise, but it was only to slip forward and sink upon her knees by his side, her arms embracing him.  It was like the fall of fair waters, so gracefully impulsive, so self-abandoning.

‘Not one kiss to-day?’ she murmured, her voice like the dying of a flute.

And she raised to him a face lit from the inmost sanctuary of love.

‘You are as beautiful,’ he said, ’as any woman of whom fable ever told.  Your beauty frightens me.  It is sometimes more than human—­as though the loveliest Greek goddess suddenly found breath and colour and the light of eyes.’

Beatrice threw her head far back, laughing silently; he saw the laughter dance upon her throat.

‘My love! my own!’ she whispered.  ‘Say you love me!’

‘Dearest, I love you!’

’Ah! the words make my heart flutter so!  I am glad, glad that I have beauty; but for that you would never have loved me.  Let me hide my face as I tell you.  I used to ask myself whether I was not really fairer than other women—­I thought—­I hoped!  But you were so indifferent.  Wilfrid, how long, how long I have loved you!  I was quite a young girl when I loved you first.  That, I said, shall be my husband, or I will never have one.  And I knew so little how to win your thought.  How ashamed it makes me to think of things I said and did in those days!’

She was silent, leaning her head against his shoulder.

‘Do you ever think of me as I was at Dunfield?’ she asked presently, with timid utterance, hardly above her breath, risking what she had never yet dared.

‘No,’ he answered, ‘I think of the present.’

His voice was a little hard, from the necessity of commanding it.

‘You did not know that I loved you then?  Think of me!  Pity me!’

He made no answer.  Beatrice spoke again, her face veiled against him, her arms pressing closer.

‘You love me with perfect love?  I have your whole heart?’

‘I love you only, Beatrice.’

’And with love as great as you ever knew?  Say that to me—­Wilfrid, say that!’ She clung to him with passion which was almost terrible.  ’Forgive me!  Only remember that you are my life, my soul!  I cannot have less than that.’

He would have been cased in triple brass if music such as this had not melted into his being.  He gave her the assurance she yearned for, and, in giving it, all but persuaded himself that he spoke the very truth.  The need of affirming his belief drew from him such words as he had the secret of; Beatrice sighed in an anguish of bliss.

‘Oh, let me die now!  It is only for this that I have lived.’