"My dear," he said, "when I first remember your mother she was about your age. I used to think she was the most beautiful person in the world. She seemed to shed happiness and peace around her—like—like a lamp sheds light. And you are just like her. Ah—don't send me away."
"Thank you," she said, struggling wildly with the cross currents of emotion set up by his words. "Thank you. I have not lived single all these years to be married at last because I happen to be like my mother."
The words seemed a treason to the dead, and the tears filled Dorothea's eyes.
He saw them; he perceived that they ran in worn channels, and the impulse of tenderness grew.
Till this moment he had spoken only the truth. His eyes took in the sunny lawn beyond the yew shadow, the still house: the whir of the lawn-mower was music at once pastoral and patriotic. He heard the break in her voice; he saw the girlish grace of her thin shape, the pathetic charm of her wistful mouth. And he lied with a good heart.
"My dear," he said, with a tremble in his voice that sounded like passion, "my dear—it's not for that—I love you, Dolly—I think I must have loved you all my life!"
And at the light that leaped into her eyes he suddenly felt that this lie was nearer truth than he had known.
"I love you, dear—I love you," he repeated, and the words were oddly pleasant to say. "Won't you love me a little, too?"
She covered her face with her hands. She could no more have doubted him than she could have doubted the God to whom she had prayed night and morning for all these lonely years.
"Love you a little?" she said softly. "Ah! Robert, don't you know that I've loved you all my life?"
So a lie won what truth could not gain. And the odd thing is that the lie has now grown quite true, and he really believes that he has always loved her, just as he certainly loves her now. For some lies come true in the telling. But most of them do not, and it is not wise to try experiments.
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