"
"Yes, I know. Three hours would sicken me. But what might not happen in
those three hours! Can't you understand?"
Suddenly she got to her feet with a passionate exclamation, her clenched
hands went to her temples in an agony of emotion. "Can't you understand?"
she repeated. "It's the going back at all for three days, for three
hours, for three minutes that counts. It might spoil everything; it might
kill my life."
His face flushed, crimsoned, then became pale; his hands ceased moving;
the knitting lay still on his knee. "Maybe, but you aren't going back for
three minutes, any more than I'm going back to the oriel window for three
seconds," he said. "We dreamers have a lot of agony in thinking about the
things we're never going to do--just as much agony as in thinking about
the things we've done. Every one of us dreamers ought to be insulated. We
ought to wear emotional lightning-rods to carry off the brain-waves into
the ground.
"I've never heard such a wonderful story," he added, after an instant,
with an intense longing to hold out his arms to her, and a still more
intense will to do no such wrong. A blind man had no right or title to be
a slave-owner, for that was what marriage to him would be. A wife would
be a victim.
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