“Be quick, darling,” he said to her one day, as she was leaving the room for a moment to fetch some necessary implement missing from her work-basket. “I hate to have you out of my sight for half a minute more than is inevitable.”
The two were alone together, and he pitched his book across the room impatiently as he spoke. She turned and came back to him.
“Why, I wonder you’re not quite tired of me,” she said, with her sunny smile, bending over him and toying with his hair.
“Tired of you! My Lilian. The only being on earth for me to love. The capacity has been kept so long in reserve that now there’s no holding it.”
She bent lower and laid her cheek against his brow. “Yes, Arthur. We are both alone in the world for each other—are we not?” she whispered; then, suddenly escaping from his would-be detaining arm, she darted to the door, turning to flash upon him a bright, loving look before she went out; and he, rising, kicked over a chair and then another, and opened and threw down three or four books without gleaning an idea of their contents, and walked to the window, then back again, and whistled, and otherwise fidgeted outrageously until her return.
Lose not a minute of your happiness, ye two; gather to the full the sweets of the present, even while ye may, for ye know not what the future may have in store. Even yet the war-cloud hangs threatening on the horizon; it has lifted, but has not vanished. Amid the rage of the elements may suddenly fall peace. It is but a lull in the tempest.
To some of his former companions-in-arms, who lived in the town or neighbourhood, Claverton was an unfailing source of wonder.
“I should never have known the fellow,” one of them would say, as they discussed him among themselves. “Why, most of us in camp used to look upon Claverton as a man with no more heart than a stone. A fellow who would close the eyes of his twin brother and then sit down to a jolly good breakfast, and crack a joke about it,”—the speaker’s idea of the acme of callousness. “And now he’s making a perfect fool of himself about a girl—hardly leaves her for a moment, they say. I can’t understand it,” and the speaker knocked the ashes out of his pipe with a jerk and a shrug, implying half pity, half contempt.
“You could if you had seen her,” said another, quietly. “She’s awfully fetching.”
“So I’m told. But still—such a hard nail as Claverton. I can’t make it out.”