“Quenton!”
Had she ever spoken it before? Or had I ever heard it as it fell at this moment from her lips? Never. It linked us two together. It gave the nay to all my doubts. I felt sure now, sure; and yet such is the hunger of a lover’s heart that I wanted her assurance in words. Would she grant me that?
Yes; but it came very softly and with a delicate aloofness at first which gave me the keenest delight.
“When you spoke of the first time you saw me and said it was from the gallery above us, you spoke as if life had begun for you that night. Did you never think that possibly it might have begun for me also? That content had revealed itself as content, not love? That I was happy that what we had expected to take place that night did not take place—that—that—”
Here her aloofness all vanished and her soul looked through her eyes. We were very near, but the collie was leaping about us, and the place was large and the gorgeousness of it all overpowering; so I contented myself with laying my hand softly on hers where it pressed against the edge of the final pillar supporting the lattice work.
“Let us go into the library,” I whispered.
But she led me elsewhere. Quieting the dog, she drew me away into a narrow hall, the purpose of which I had never understood till I had learned the secret of the hidden stairway and how this hall denoted the space which the lower end of the inn’s outside stairway had formerly occupied. Pausing, she gave me an earnest look, then, speaking very softly:
“It was here—on the steps which once united the ground with those still remaining above, that my father and my mother pledged themselves to each other in a love that has survived death. Shall we—”
She said no more: I had her in my arms and life had begun for us in very truth.