It was a warm July day, and the few visitors at the Hall were sunning themselves on the lawn, and listening to my lord’s sporting reminiscences, while the lovers had wandered to a bower festooned with roses and fragrant clematis.
“But you have not answered my question, Elaine,” Sir Harold went on, and there was an earnestness in his tones that surprised her.
She turned her eyes toward him—lustrous eyes, like pansies wet with dew, saying, “Harold, I believe that you are jealous, and I dislike jealous people.”
“Then I am to understand that you dislike me?” he smiled; but there was an undercurrent of sadness in his voice.
“Oh, my darling! how foolish you are! Why will you tease me so?”
Lady Elaine clung to him in a passion of love, and yet he was far from being satisfied.
“I believe that I am of a jealous nature,” he said. “It is one of the misfortunes of my race.”
“I am glad that you call it a misfortune,” the girl observed, her lips trembling, “and I sincerely trust that you will never be jealous of me, Harold. Where there is jealousy there cannot be true love. You must trust me all in all, or not at all!”
He was silent for a few minutes, and gnawed his mustache impatiently.
“My darling,” he said, at last, “I have laid bare my life to you. My notions of love and marriage may seem peculiar, but the thought that the woman I love had ever willingly accepted the attentions of another man would be torture to me. I have never had a sweetheart before, I have never pressed my lips to those of a girl, or written one line of nonsense to any woman living. I give you all—unreservedly—my first and my last love.”