He must speak to her. He would not hesitate to tell her what he thought.

But he did hesitate. When she descended half an hour later, and paused
at the foot of the stairs to assure herself that her passage downstairs
had not roused her mother from sleep, the light fell on her listening
face and tender eyes; and he read that in them which checked the words
on his lips; that which, whether it were folly or wisdom--a wisdom
higher than the serpent's, more perfect than the most accurate
calculation of values and chances--drove for ever from his mind the
thought that she would desert her charge. He said not a word of what he
had thought; the indignant reasoning, the hot, conclusive arguments fell
from him and left him bare. With her hands in his, seeking no more to
move her or convince her, he sat silent; and by mute looks and dumb
love--more potent than eloquence or oratory--strove to support and
console her.

She, too, was silent. Stillness had fallen on both of them. But her
hands clung to his, and now and again pressed them convulsively; and now
and again, too, she would lift her eyes to his, and gaze at him with a
pathetic intentness, as if she would stamp his likeness on her brain.
But when he returned the look, and tried to read her meaning in her
eyes, she smiled. "You are afraid of me?" she whispered. "No, I shall
not be weak again."

But even as she reassured him he detected a flicker of pain in her eyes,
he felt that her hands were cold; and but that he feared to shake her
composure he would not have rested content with her answer.

This sudden silence, this new way of looking at him, were the only
things that perplexed him. In all else, silent as they sat, their
communion was perfect. It was in the mind of each that the women might
be arrested on the morrow; in the mind of each that this was their last
evening together, the last of few, yet not so few that they did not seem
to the man and the girl to bulk large in their lives. On that hearth
they had met, there she had proved to him what she was, there he had
spoken, there spent the clouded never-to-be-forgotten days of their
troubled courtship. No wonder that as they sat hand in hand, their hair
almost mingling, their eyes on the red glow of the smouldering log, and,
not daring to look forward, looked back--no wonder that their love grew
to be something other than the common love of man and maid, something
higher and more beautiful, touched--as the hills