I told her that it mattered nothing the conditions that she put upon me; that so long as I saw her and knew that she believed me to be her friend I asked for nothing.
She answered, still very quietly but putting her hand on mine, that she had loved me from the first moment of our meeting.

That she wondered that yet once again love should have come into her life when she had thought that that was all finished for her.

She told me that love had been in her life nothing but pain and distress, and then she asked me, very simply, whether I would try to keep this thing so that it should be happy and should endure.

I said that I would obey her in anything that she should command....

There followed then the strangest life for me.