"Now I know you care for me!" he breathed low in her ear. "You said it was breaking your heart, too. Do you think I'll give you up now to any man on earth? Ah, dear, you little understand a love like mine if you think I'd give you up now. Pollyanna, say you love me—say it with your own dear lips!"
For one long minute Pollyanna lay unresisting in the fiercely tender embrace that encircled her; then with a sigh that was half content, half renunciation, she began to draw herself away.
"Yes, Jimmy, I do love you." Jimmy's arms tightened, and would have drawn her back to him; but something in the girl's face forbade. "I love you dearly. But I couldn't ever be happy with you and feel that—Jimmy, don't you see, dear? I'll have to know—that I'm free, first."
"Nonsense, Pollyanna! Of course you're free!" Jimmy's eyes were mutinous again.
Pollyanna shook her head.
"Not with this hanging over me, Jimmy. Don't you see? It was mother, long ago, that broke his heart—my mother. And all these years he's lived a lonely, unloved life in consequence. If now he should come to me and ask me to make that up to him, I'd have to do it, Jimmy. I'd have to. I couldn't refuse! Don't you see?"
But Jimmy did not see; he could not see. He would not see, though Pollyanna pleaded and argued long and tearfully. But Pollyanna, too, was obdurate, though so sweetly and heartbrokenly obdurate that
