Her eyes answered him. They had never left his, and now the love-light that beamed from them was not to be mistaken.
“Yes, Colvin,” she said softly. “I think I can. But—don’t call yourself names.” And with the words she was gathered to him while they exchanged their first kiss. “Can I love you?” she murmured unsteadily, yielding in his embrace. “Can I love you, did you say? Can I help it? My darling one, you are made to be loved,” she uttered, in a very abandonment of passionate tenderness. “But I—why should you love me—you who have seen so much of the world? I am so inexperienced, so ignorant. I am not even decent-looking. How can I ever make you happy?”
“Ignorant? Inexperienced? My Aletta, you would more than hold your own anywhere—perhaps will some day,” he added, as though to himself. “Not even decent-looking!” he echoed banteringly, and, holding her from him at arm’s length, he affected to scan her up and down. “No. No presence, no grace, supremely awkward—hands like the sails of a fishing-smack.”
“There, that will do,” laughed the girl, giving him a playful tap with one of the libelled hands, a hand which would have served as a model in a sculpture of Iseult of Brittany. “You are only beginning to sum up my imperfections, and I am frightened already. No, really; I feel hardly inclined for a joke even. I am far, far too happy.”
“Kwaa-kwak-kwak! Kwaa-kwak-kwak!”
Both started, then laughed. The old koorhaan, first disturbed across the river bed, was returning, as though some instinct notified him that the fell destroyer was harmless to-day. Right overhead he came, an easy twenty-five yards’ shot. Instinctively Colvin reached for the gun, which he had rested against an adjoining bush; but as quickly he recovered himself.
“We’ll grant the old squawker an amnesty to-day,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t think I could have missed that shot either.”
“Kwaa-kwak-kwak! Kwaa-kwak-kwak!” yelled the bird, as, hovering for a moment, it dropped down among the thorns on the very spot whence it had been first roused. Then they talked on, those two, happy in the happiness which cannot often come in a lifetime—happy in the golden sunshine and the glowing summer of their lives—happy amid the rejoicing surroundings of Nature, in their vastness and peace and calm. Yet, away there to the North—what? The gathering cloud, black as night, sweeping down, steadily, surely—whirled along on the spreading demon-wings of war—the cloud which, bursting into lurid thunders, should overwhelm all with its blasting breath in a vortex of hideous hate and red slaughter, and woe and destitution. No; for the contemplation of this they had no mind.
Suddenly Aletta gave a start, uttering a little cry of consternation.