Paul turned an unchanged face upon Yerba, who was watching him eagerly, uneasily, almost breathlessly.
"And you think this concerns ME!" he said bitterly. "You think only of this, when I speak of the precious letter that bade me hope, and brought me to you?"
"Paul," said the girl, with wondering eyes and hesitating lips; "do you mean to say that—that—this is—nothing to you?"
"Yes—but forgive me, darling!" he broke out again, with a sudden vague remorsefulness, as he once more sought her elusive hand. "I am a brute—an egotist! I forgot that it might be something to YOU."
"Paul," continued the girl, her voice quivering with a strange joy, "do you say that you—YOU yourself, care nothing for this?"
"Nothing," he answered, gazing at her transfigured face with admiring wonder.
"And"—more timidly, as a faint aurora kindled in her checks—"that you don't care—that—that—I am coming to you WITH A NAME, to give you in—exchange?"
He started.
"Yerba, you are not mocking me? You will be my wife?"
She smiled, yet moving softly backwards with the grave stateliness of a vanishing yet beckoning goddess, until she reached the sumach-bush from which she had emerged. He followed. Another backward step, and it yielded to let her through; but even as it did so she caught him in her arms, and for a single moment it closed upon them both, and hid them in its glory. A still lingering song-bird, possibly convinced that he had mistaken the season, and that spring had really come, flew out with a little cry to carry the message south; but even then Paul and Yerba emerged with such innocent, childlike gravity, and, side by side, walked so composedly towards the house, that he thought better of it.