"Ah, Beatrice!" he was saying, "you have given me back life itself! Can
you guess what I have lived through in these days? Can you imagine how I
have thought of you and suffered day and night, and said to myself that
I should never have your love? Can you dream what it must be to a man
like me, lonely, friendless, half heart-broken, to find the one jewel
worth living for, the one light worth seeking, the one woman worth
loving--and then to long for her almost without hope, and so long? It is
long, too. Who counts the days or the weeks when he loves? It is as
though we had loved from the beginning of our lives! Can you or I
imagine what it all was like before we met? I cannot remember that past
time. I had no life before it--it is all forgotten, all gone, all buried
and for ever. You have made everything new to me, new and beautiful and
full of light--ah, Beatrice! How I love you!"
Rather a long speech at such a moment, an older woman would have
thought, and not over original in choice of similes and epithets, but
fluent enough and good enough to serve the purpose and to turn the
current of Beatrice's girlish life.
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