She did not look unhappy and worn now. Her eyes shone with the light of love—the beautiful lips wreathed into smiles—her whole face was transfigured with her great happiness.
“Dear love, you have grown more beautiful than ever; and all for me,” he murmured in that peculiar tone of his which bound her to him with a magnetic force that was almost intoxicating. “It is all for me—isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she answered without hesitation; looking him straightly, fearlessly in the eyes. Heaven help her!
“And yet you doubted me!”
“Eustace, darling, why did you never write to me? At least, why did you only write in that ordinary, formal and matter-of-fact way?”
“Because it would have been the height of insanity, under existing circumstances, to have done otherwise. And so you doubted me? You thought that I had only been playing with you? Or that even otherwise I had only to be away from you two or three weeks and I could forget?”
His tone, low and quiet, was just tinged with reproach. But it contained a subtle consciousness of power. And to her ears it sounded inexpressibly sweet, for it was this very sense of power that constituted the magnetism which drew her to him.
“Yes, I will confess. I did think that,” she answered. “I can hide nothing from you. You have read my thoughts exactly. Ah, my own—my own! What have I not gone through! But you are with me again. Life seems too good altogether.”
“It was our first parting, and a longish one,” he said musingly as he walked beside her towards the settlement—his horse, with the bridle over its neck, following behind with the docility of a dog. “It was good for both of us, Eanswyth, my life. Now, do you think it was exactly delightful to me.”
“N-no,” she replied plaintively, pressing to her side the arm which he had passed through hers as they walked. “Though, of late, I haven’t known what to think.”