“Tell me,” he said, “that you return my love.”
His lips came steadily closer to hers. They had almost touched when a vision of Korak sprang like a miracle before her eyes. She saw Korak’s face close to hers, she felt his lips hot against hers, and then for the first time in her life she guessed what love meant. She drew away, gently.
“I am not sure,” she said, “that I love you. Let us wait. There is plenty of time. I am too young to marry yet, and I am not sure that I should be happy in London or Paris—they rather frighten me.”
How easily and naturally she had connected his avowal of love with the idea of marriage! The Hon. Morison was perfectly sure that he had not mentioned marriage—he had been particularly careful not to do so. And then she was not sure that she loved him! That, too, came rather in the nature of a shock to his vanity. It seemed incredible that this little barbarian should have any doubts whatever as to the desirability of the Hon. Morison Baynes.
The first flush of passion cooled, the Hon. Morison was enabled to reason more logically. The start had been all wrong. It would be better now to wait and prepare her mind gradually for the only proposition which his exalted estate would permit him to offer her. He would go slow. He glanced down at the girl’s profile. It was bathed in the silvery light of the great tropic moon. The Hon. Morison Baynes wondered if it were to be so easy a matter to “go slow.” She was most alluring.
Meriem rose. The vision of Korak was still before her.
“Good night,” she said. “It is almost too beautiful to leave,” she waved her hand in a comprehensive gesture which took in the starry heavens, the great moon, the broad, silvered plain, and the dense shadows in the distance, that marked the jungle. “Oh, how I love it!”
“You would love London more,” he said earnestly. “And London would love you. You would be a famous beauty in any capital of Europe. You would have the world at your feet, Meriem.”
“Good night!” she repeated, and left him.
The Hon. Morison selected a cigarette from his crested case, lighted it, blew a thin line of blue smoke toward the moon, and smiled.