“I felt it.”
“How?”
“Did you never feel certain of a presence which you neither saw nor heard?”
“I do not know; perhaps yes,” replied the young man, thoughtfully; “the atmosphere of a particular person sometimes does seem to enwrap us, but this is visionary speculation. I did not think these vagaries could haunt a wild, fresh, untaxed brain like yours. They have hitherto seemed to me purely the result of an over-refined intellect.”
“It seemed to me as if my grandmother were close by,” said the gipsy.
“Your grandmother! I thought she never left her cave—her home!”
“I know that—she could not reach this place—you must be right. But why should the bare thought have made me tremble if she was not here—I who never tremble, at least from dread?”
“And if not from dread, what is the power that can make you tremble?” inquired the youth, bending his mischievous eyes smilingly upon her.
She did not speak, but the little hands, still clasped in his, began to quiver like newly-caught ring-doves. Those wonderful eyes were lifted to his, luminous still, for all the dews of her young soul could not have quenched their brilliancy—but so flooded with love-light, so eloquent of the one great life passion, that the smile died on his lip. There was something almost startling in the thought that his hand had stricken the crystal rock from which such floods of brightness gushed forth. He felt like one who had, half in sport, aroused some sleeping spirit, which must henceforth be a destiny to him—an angel or a demon in his path forever.
“You almost make me tremble,” he whispered, bending forward and kissing her upturned forehead softly, and with a sort of awe. “Come, love, come, let us walk; this still moonlight lies upon us both like a winding-sheet.”