Ah! my beloved one!
LXXIII
I have one more memory of that night. As I was leaving—for I was resolved to remain at my hotel until our marriage, which, for many reasons, was to be an immediate one without preparation and with but little ceremony,—I asked my love why in the months of her father’s illness, and during the time when perplexities of various kinds were in all our hearts, she never allowed herself to remain alone with me or to go where I went even with her father’s permission.
And her answer, given with a smile and a blush was this:
“I did not dare.”
She did not dare! My conscientious darling.
And I had not dared. But my fears were not her fears. I had feared to be presumptuous; of building up a fairyland out of dreams; of yielding to my imagination rather than to my good sense. And yet, deep down in some inner consciousness, a faint insidious hope had whispered to itself that if I showed myself worthy, perhaps—perhaps—
And now perhaps had become reality, and all doubt and mistrust a vanished dream.
But though I had walked in clouded ways and had not known my Orpha’s heart, there had been one in the household who had. I learned it that night from a few words uttered by Clarke on my return to the hotel.
I was not surprised to find him waiting for me in the lobby; we had come into such close contact during the strenuous days that had just passed, that it would have seemed unnatural not to have found him there. But what did astonish me was to see the wistful look with which he contemplated me as I signified to him my wish for him to follow me upstairs. But once together in my room, I understood, and letting the full joyousness of my heart to appear, I smilingly said: