But after
all I must say it now." She had turned away, but in the movement she
had stopped herself and dropped her gaze upon him. The two remained
a while in this situation, exchanging a long look- the large,
conscious look of the critical hours of life. Then he got up and
came near her, deeply respectful, as if he were afraid he had been too
familiar. "I'm absolutely in love with you."
He had repeated the announcement in a tone of almost impersonal
discretion, like a man who expected very little from it but who
spoke for his own needed relief. The tears came into her eyes: this
time they obeyed the sharpness of the pang that suggested to her
somehow the slipping of a fine bolt- backward, forward, she couldn't
have said which. The words he had uttered made him, as he stood there,
beautiful and generous, invested him as with the golden air of early
autumn; but, morally speaking, she retreated before them- facing him
still- as she had retreated in the other cases before a like
encounter. "Oh don't say that, please," she answered with an intensity
that expressed the dread of having, in this case too, to choose and
decide. What made her dread great was precisely the force which, as it
would seem, ought to have banished all dread- the sense of something
within herself, deep down, that she supposed to be inspired and
trustful passion.
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