“Elsie, my sweetheart! You are—I feel it! I know it! And a little while ago I thought you did not care—I thought you wished to show me that you did not care, and that I was nothing to you!”
“How could you think such mean things of me, Bart?”
“I did not want to think them, God knows! but they would come into my head.”
The music was some simple little love-song, and it came sweetly to their ears. It seemed to be particularly adapted to the moment, and ever after, through all their lives, that tune was the sweetest of all tunes to them.
“Elsie, you do love me—you do?”
She did not answer in words, but her hands were clasped in his, and he received a pressure that told him much. And only a short time before he had fought another man for claiming to receive such a pressure from those dear hands.
He would have kissed her then and there, but a strolling couple approached along the veranda.
“Let’s take a little walk through the grounds,” he suggested. “It is warm. Will you need a wrap?”
“Nothing more than this I have about my shoulders,” she answered.
They descended the steps and moved away along a walk. Up from a spot near where they had been rose a dark shadow, like a thing of evil, and stole silently after them.