the door-way curtains, A deep-shaded candle on the reading-table by the bedside threw a light over the lower part of her face, and on one out-stretched arm in its long white-worked frill, and on the hand with up-held fingers on the white rounded edge of the bed. All the rest was shadowed.
'Well?' I said, smiling, and standing for a moment with the curtains in my backward hands.
She smiled back to me. I crossed over to her, and sat down beside the outstretched arm of the long white-worked frill and the hand of the upheld fingers on the rounded edge of the bed. And I took the hand of the upheld fingers, while her two eyes looked quietly in mine; and bent, and softly kissed her two soft red lips; and she murmured:
'You see, I hadn't to chase you for it, after all!'
'No,' I answered, 'I cheerfully do what the dilly-ducks would not do: I come to be killed. Death's too sweet to be fearful.'
'. . . What do you mean?'
I kissed her, again, smiling:
'That I love you.'
'. . . Then I hope you will always mean that; for I love you—oh, I do love you,—ever so much!'
'More than you love yourself?'
'I don't think I have any self left to love. It's all yours!'
Then, in loving myself, I shall but be loving you?'
'Yes!' 'Love must be unselfish, then, whether it like it or no. For, in loving itself, it only succeeds in loving somebody else. . . . Do you understand it all?'
And seeing she did not, all of it, I once more bent again, and once more kissed her two soft red lips; and she once more murmured, laughing low:
'I understand that part!. . . But—I seem to think you might do it over a-gain!'
II
I had divided the day off in this way: My books from ten to one; then lunch; then generally somewhere
