“And now?” she whispered, gazing, at him with enormous eyes.
“I got half-way to Innsbruck, and then I decided that there was only one thing in life—one real thing—and that was you! So I came back to ask you to forgive me and give me that one thing I want, and luckily I got here at a moment when you badly needed me.” His mouth tightened, and his eyes grew bleak at the memory of the danger he had found her in when he got back. “I think even Rudi was seriously alarmed when you wouldn’t come off that bridge, and I realized that you couldn’t...! Oh, darling,” his arms tightened, and he drew her very close indeed, “when I realized your danger I thought that I had come back to perpetual emptiness, and I think I died a thousand deaths myself. Every step I took across the bridge was a nightmare, for I thought you might attempt to turn and run from me, and then—!”
She sighed.
“I’m too weak to run from you,” she confessed. “Never, never could I run from you ... and even now I don’t blame you for wanting to escape from me while you could. A man like yourself, dedicated to a certain way of life, can’t be expected to be bothered with someone utterly insignificant like me. And if—when you’ve recovered from the shock of finding me on the bridge...”
But he placed his hand over her mouth.
“Janie, I love you,” he told her. He repeated, “I love you. Do you believe it? Either,” rather more roughly, “you do or you don’t!”
She moved nearer to him.
“I believe you, Max,” she whispered thankfully. And then, incredulously, “But you—you can’t mean that you—you don’t want me to marry Abraham Winterton? For personal reasons?”
“For very personal reasons,” he assured her, lowering his lips to her hair. “I want to marry you myself.”
“And I won’t interfere with your life?” turning her lips up to his, so that she spoke against them.
“You won’t interfere with my life,” he assured her solemnly. “You’ll make it! And oh, my darling,” as if he was taking a solemn oath, “I promise you that I will make yours! If you can put up with someone as—as demanding as I’ll turn out to be! Far more demanding than Winterton would ever be!”
At that she broke away from him, horrified because she had forgotten Winterton. But he snatched her back into his arms and removed the last of her anxieties.
“Winterton won’t really mind, because he knows you’re not the least bit in love with him. And he wants you to be happy—he told me that last night—and if I can prove to him that I’ll make you happy, then he’ll let me have you.” He stood up, drawing her with him. “Shall we go together and see him now, and then you won’t have even a mild guilt complex to bother you?”
She nodded mutely.
“But first,” he said, when they were standing face to face on the narrow mountain track, “I’d like to blot out something from your memory—the memory of the kiss I gave you the other day. This one is going to be the forerunner of so many more like it that you may want to marry Winterton after all!”
Pathway of Roses Page 13