atues. She was more self-possessed
than I, for she advanced and offered me her hand, and I took it
clumsily, as if I had no idea what to do with it.

I had loved her from the very first moment I had seen her sweet and
noble face, and every hour had seemed to make me love her more. And yet
I had never breathed a word to her, and here we were plighted to each
other in this strange and sudden fashion, with no preliminaries of
courtship, with no question asked by me or answered by her, and hardly
at the moment an understanding of how a thing so curious had come to
pass.

I have not forgotten anything that was said or done that happy hour, but
it is still all too sacred to be written down for any eye but hers or
mine to read. It is enough to say that I learned she loved me. Her love
has ceased to be to me the puzzle it once was, for one grows used to
everything, and I have been both her husband and her lover now for so
many years that it would be strange indeed if any sense of strangeness
were left in it. But when I first found out that she had fallen in love
with me just as quickly as I with her, I could not get over the wonder
of it, or the feeling of added unworthiness with which the knowledge
burdened me. But, in truth, the very things which make a man feel so
clumsy and coarse in the presence of the woman he loves are the things
that take a woman's fancy, just as her sweetness and delicacy are the
things that take his. I never was a bit of a handsome fellow, but I was
a big man, flowing over with health and vigor, with a big voice and
a broad chest and shoulders, and, until I fell in love, I never set a
great deal of value on good looks in a man. But there was I, a great
hulking fellow who had passed all the best part of his life in the
giving and receiving of hard knocks, a fellow who could not for the life
of him help feeling that he carried the flavor of the camp about with
him. What was there, in the name of Heaven, I used to ask myself in
those first days of courtship, for a delicate and high-minded girl of
refined breeding to fall in love with? But that, my lads and lasses all,
is the provision of great nature which makes delicacy love strength and
strength love gentleness, which makes fear look pretty to a soldier's
eyes, and makes courage look noble and admirable to a charming creature
who is afraid of a mouse. So now that I am older and more experienced,
I have no wonder that my wife did not choose to fall in