Have her he would.

She had given herself to him.

Everything should have been easy after that, and instead, here he was alone in the night, wrestling with himself, in deeper trouble than ever, and Hilma farther than ever away from him.
It was true, he might have Hilma, even now, if he was willing to marry her.

But marriage, to his mind, had been always a vague, most remote possibility, almost as vague and as remote as his death,--a thing that happened to some men, but that would surely never occur to him, or, if it did, it would be after long years had passed, when he was older, more settled, more mature--an event that belonged to the period of his middle life, distant as yet.
He had never faced the question of his marriage.

He had kept it at an immense distance from him.