By and by he made her sit on the wooden seat under the rose canopy; and going down on one knee, he took up a fold of her dress and kissed it. No man but one of Latin blood could have done this and kept his dignity; but as he did the thing it was beautiful, even sacred to Mary, as if he knelt to pour balm on the wound that once he had given her. Though his lips touched only her dress, the very hem of it, she felt the thrill of the touch, as she had felt his kiss on her mouth. This was her lover, and her knight. She half feared, half adored the thought that from this moment she had granted him rights; that a man loved her, and had kissed her, and that she had confessed to loving him. It was so different from anything which she had dreamed could come to her that she could hardly believe it was happening: for when she had left the convent she was still a nun in her outlook upon life.
Yet now this bowed dark head, and the rim of brown throat between the short, thick hair and the stiff white collar, looked somehow familiar, as if the man who knelt there had always been hers. So dear was the head, so boyish in its humility, that ridiculous tears rushed smarting to her eyes. She wanted to laugh and to cry. Where his lips had touched her dress, she almost expected to see a spark of light clinging, like a fallen star.
When he looked up and saw the tears, still kneeling he put his arms around her, and slowly drew her to him. Then her hands stole out to clasp his neck, her fingers interlacing, and she let her cheek lie softly against his. His face was hot as if the sun had scorched it, and she could feel a little pulse beating in his temple. There was a faint suggestion rather than a fragrance of tobacco smoke about his hair and his clothes, which made her want to laugh with a delightful, childish sense of amusement that mingled with the thrill of her love for him.
"You always belonged to me, you know," he said. "What time I have wasted, not finding you before! But I knew you existed. I knew always that I should meet you some day. And then I nearly lost you—but we won't talk of that, because you have forgiven me: and forgiving means forgetting, doesn't it?"
She answered only by pressing her face more closely against his.
"But there are other things for you to forgive," he went on. "I used to think I was very strong, not only in my body but in my will. Now I see that I can be weak. Can you love a man who does things he knows to be beneath him? I have made a fool of myself in the Casino—a fool like the rest. I began because I was miserable, but——"
"Was it I who made you miserable?"
"Yes. But that is no excuse for me. I deserved it all and more: I'd hurt you. And afterward, I went on being a fool, because—it gave me a kind of pleasure, when I'd lost pleasure in other things. It's the weakness of it that I hate in myself, not so much the thing I did. A woman should have a man's strength to lean on, if she is to love him. Weakness is unpardonable in a man. Yet I'm asking you to forgive it, and let me begin over again."
"I love you as you are," Mary said. "What am I, to judge? What have I myself been doing?"
"You are a girl; and you are so young. You knew no better. I knew. You were led on. I walked into the trap with my eyes open."