O, northward, love, come northward,
Where strange things befall!”
CHAPTER XIII.
TOKENS
He talked, having a willing listener—she laughed at him for a chatterbox. He had long fits of silence—she tried to enter into his dreams. Sometimes he was moody and troubled; and she knew why, and blamed herself for his self-reproach; sometimes, and that most often, they drifted soul to soul on a halcyon tide, and let the world go, and forgot everything but themselves and the rapture of living.
And they met and met; and still were faithful to their platonic compact. It was pretty to mark their idyll; but Nature, while she hung them with flowers, was for ever a little impatient of their content.
Nobody interfered with them; their intimacy was encouraged rather than suspected; the world conspired for their ruin. They were so little put to it to practise any duplicity, that their consciences almost came to acquit them of the necessity for it. In company they were called upon to display no greater decorum than good taste would have imposed upon a betrothed couple; and elsewhere, on the strength of that mutual understanding, they could consort in honest seeming, as if no guilty thought were at their hearts.
And, indeed, there was none in Isabella’s—a child of seventeen, and in love. Guilt is for criminals, who work the other way and through hate of their kind. Fanchette’s soul should have been the guilty one.
One day Tiretta took a queer object from his pocket. It was down in the deep gardens, and they were alone together again.
“Do you see that?” he said. It was a little white slipper, woefully grubby.
“If you please, Bonbec,” she answered. It was her name for him, quaint in its underlying confidence, but betraying nothing to chance ears.