He stood before the girl. She rose, and they looked at one another. Their hearts were somehow conscious of a vague foreboding. Then she moved, and made a sign to him to follow her to the window. Together they stepped out upon the balcony which overlooked the dreaming grounds.
It was a night for love and lovers. The moon burned large behind a film of mist, whose gauze just veiled the barren spaces of the dark, and charmed the sleeping trees, and shook within its tissue a spangled star or two, caught like fireflies in a web. Deep and shadowy below them lay the gardens, their far solitary sentinels two dim and grey colossi, Hercules and a satyr, whose hugeness alone had in past days saved them from the hands of the despoiler. Now, mere unsubstantial phantoms of the mist, they seemed to move and palpitate, as if some antique spirit in the night stirred in their stony veins. Here and there low down a light twinkled from a distant lodge or villa. Not a sound broke the utter stillness, save now and again the drowsy burr of a cricket, or the swish of a bat’s wings as its shadow dipped and fled.
Silent in that breathing trance of things, the two stood together and drank in the beauty of the scene. Their pulses throbbed in unison to its sensuous appeal; they touched, and did not draw apart. Never before had he seemed so dear or she so fair in the other’s eyes. He marvelled how he could ever have dared to lift his to this white miracle of girlhood—to dream of possessing it. As she stood near him, the sense of her proud young loveliness, so submissive to his love, of all that maiden treasure, and he the chosen master of its sweets and secrets, swelled in his heart until he scarce could bear its rapture. Mad thoughts were surging in his brain; he felt that he was losing command of himself, when suddenly she turned and spoke to him, a tense emotion in her voice:
“Whatever happens, keep me in your heart.”
“Isabel!” he breathed.
He held out his arms; and she came instantly into them, and gave her lips to him, yielding herself utterly with just one sigh like a dreaming child’s. All discretion, all good resolutions were forgotten in the passionate stress of that moment. He strained her to his breast with a fierce tyranny of possession; and, her face lifted close to his, she whispered out her soul.
“I shall not be false, even though—O, you will believe me, you will believe me, will you not?”
“Hush!” he said. “What is there to fear?”
“I do not know,” she sighed.
“Not the cryptic utterances of that rude old woman?”