THE UNKNOWN MR. KENT
and thus gave all he had to give! I am helpless! I am nothing, in this fight—the only one from which I've ever flinched. I wanted to go before I gave myself away; but you said—you said———"
He stopped and she knew that the poet soul of him that had been so scrupulously concealed from all the world, was bursting its way, released by the alchemy of love, to his last abashed declaration. She waited intent on what he might say, this man who had posed through all his life as one without sentiment, hard, inflexible, masterful, and who now for the first time was stripping nude his spirit.
"Do you know," he said, "I've always been ashamed of something that I liked something I read. It seemed too fine to say aloud; but it's what I want to say now:
"I am he that cries aloud beneath your gates,
"With eyes uplifted to the moon, the night, your castle walls.
"No beggar I for paltry dole! No suppliant for paltry favours,
"Worthless, ephemeral, and indifferently thrown.
"I ask all you have; all you have been; all you are;
"All that you may ever be.
"I am that throbbing thing of love,
"Venturesome, calling for its own."
