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.