Love: what was it? Did she feel it? Oh, if she could only tell! What should she say to him when she met him; and when should she meet him? Perhaps he had come to regret his avowal to her, had been wearied and disappointed by her coldness, and would not come again! At the thought her heart contracted as if at the touch of an icy hand. But the next moment it leapt with a suffocating sense of mystery, of half-fearful joy, for she saw him coming across the lawn to her, and heard her name, spoken as it had never yet been spoken excepting by him; and she stood, still as a statue, as he held out his hand and, looking into her eyes, murmured her name again.
"Ida!"
CHAPTER XVIII.
"Ida!"
It was the lover's cry of appeal, the prayer for love uttered by the heart that loves; and it went straight to her own heart.
She put out her hand, and he took it and held it in both his.
"I have come for your answer," he said in the low voice that thrills; the voice which says so much more than the mere words. "I could not wait—I tried to keep away from you until to-morrow; but it was of no use. I am here, you see, and I want your answer. Don't tell me it is 'No!' Trust me, Ida—trust to my love for you. I will devote my life to trying to make you happy. Ah, but you know! What is your answer? Have you thought—you promised me you would think?"
"I have thought," she said, at last. "I have thought of nothing else—I wanted to tell you the truth—to tell you truly as I would to myself—but it is so hard to know—Sometimes when I think that you may go away, and that I may not see you again, my heart sinks, and I feel, oh! so wretched."
He waited for no more, but caught her to him, and as she lay in his arms only slightly struggling, her face upturned, he bent his own, almost white with passion, and kissed her on the lips, and not once only.
The blood rushed to her face, her bosom rose and fell, and, her face grown pale again, her eyes gazed up into his half fiercely, half appealingly; then suddenly they grew moist, as if with tears, her lips quivered, and from them came, as if involuntarily, the words of surrender, the maiden confession: