CHAPTER XII.
How Monica with faltering footsteps enters the mysterious moonlight, and how she fares therein.
What a noise the tiny gravel makes beneath her feet, as she hurries rapidly towards the garden! How her heart beats! Oh that she were back again in her pretty safe room, with the naughty Kit to scold! Oh, if Aunt Priscilla were to rise, and, looking out of her bedroom window, catch a glimpse of her, as she hastes to meet the man she has been forbidden to know! A thousand terrors possess her. The soft beauty of the night is unseen, the rushing of sweet brooks in the distance is unheard. She hurries on, a little, lithe, frightened figure, with wide eyes and parted lips, to the rendezvous she has not sought. And what a little way it had seemed in the glad daylight, yet what a journey in the silent, fearsome night! There are real tears, born of sheer nervousness, in her beautiful eyes, as she runs along the garden path, and at last—at last—finds herself face to face with Desmond.
"Ah, you have come!" cries he, gladly, going to meet her while yet she is a long way off.
"Yes." She can say no more, but her fear has departed at sight of him, and once more she grows calm, collected, and mistress of herself. She keeps well away from him, however, and holds out to him—that "white wonder"—her hand, from a very great distance, as it seems to him. Does she distrust him, then? Thinking of this, Brian takes the extended hand, and holds it in a clasp that though tender is light, and refrains with much forbearance from pressing his lips to it.
"To come here, and at this hour! It is madness!" says Monica, hastily.
"A very blessed madness, then, and with method in it: it has enabled me to see you."
"Oh, do not talk like that. You ought not to see me at all. And, now, what is it? Kit said you wanted me sadly."
"And so I do, and not only now but always."
"If," reproachfully, "it is nothing pressing, would not to-morrow have done?"