'Not when I write to say that we are to be married in fourteen days.'
Ted read the lines Stella had written, and his face gleamed with joy.
'Oh, that is splendid!' he cried; 'but should you put that in about the thousand a year? Shouldn't it be—"Will it be necessary, when we love each other so much?"'
'It is indifferent. One of the advantages of so much social superstition is that a good many things are taken for granted.'
Ted, notwithstanding, made the correction in his uncial, squarely legible writing. Then he dwelt on the last sentence, and looked reproachfully into the girl's face.
'You kiss everyone at Fairacre three times on the mouth, but you don't kiss me once—and in two weeks you leave every man jack of them for my sake. Stella, do you call it decent, or according to God's holy ordinance, as it says in the Prayer-book?'
He bent over her, and she turned her cheek to him. But he took her in his arms and covered her face with burning kisses. She turned deadly pale and trembled, but remained as passive as if she had been drugged. Then after a little she fought down the crowding thoughts that made the present give place to what had been. Memory, like a rebel, betrayed her to a surging host of recollections that seemed to stamp this moment with a seal of infamy. But the keen pangs of wounded pride, of hopeless love, and jealousy, came to her aid. She conquered her shrinking shame, her instinctive revolt—reminding herself that it was less humiliating to be kissed by unloved lips than by those that were so dear to her.
'Tell me, Stella, you are not sorry you gave me back your promise again yesterday,' said Ted in a low voice.
'Sorry? Oh no—I am glad,' she replied, feeling for the time her words were true—so fiercely did she seek to trample out that smouldering jealousy which was ever ready to leap into consuming flame. He was more than content with the answer. Yet, after she disengaged herself from his arms, he tested her tardy, passionately longed-for submission a little farther.
'Stella, come and kiss me on the mouth three times,' he said, in a tremulous voice.