"Marjorie!" I said. "Come here a little while before you leave."
She turned her white face—whiter in the pale moonlight than I had ever seen it—toward me, still moving slowly away.
"And you," she whispered, "are the man who told me, only a few hours ago, that you wanted me for your wife!"
"I do, my darling!" I replied, with all the fervor I could put into the words. "I mean no more than I say when I ask to touch your cheek with my lips, your hand even, the hem of your gown."
She was gone; and as I sat there I reflected for the second time that evening what an ass I had been. Marjorie had taken what I thought a harmless request and turned it into an insult. I cursed anew the damnable training I had had in the field of love-making. It had me as unfit to win the heart of a pure and virtuous maiden as a brigand.
The worst was, she had gone to her chamber with the thought still on her mind that I was a liar of the meanest stripe. After professing a pure love I had, at the first opportunity, she imagined, showed the emptiness of my pretence, the falseness of my heart.
Sleep fled this time from my eyes, and no wonder. I propped my head high with pillows and resigned myself to wakefulness and moody thoughts till daybreak.
As soon as it was light I took stationery from my trunk and wrote an impassioned letter to my beloved, that she might see, before we met again, how terribly she had misjudged me. I told her the story as it really was—my sudden awakening, the longing that possessed me for some recognition from the being to whom all my life's love had been pledged. I detailed the sickness of heart with which I realized how woefully my object was misapprehended. I touched on the absence of sleep that followed my error, and in closing begged her to write me just a word to say that I was forgiven, before I underwent the agony of meeting her unjustly accusing eyes. This I signed, "Your husband that is to be—that must be—with all respect and love."
It was almost as great a shock as if she had refused to read my note when the maid whom I summoned to deliver it, brought me a tiny sheet of paper bearing these words:
"Of course you are forgiven, my dear boy. I understood it all a minute after I left you. Sorry you took it to heart. If you wish to please me do not allude to it when we meet."