It was nothing to Frithiof that they were standing at the side of the king’s highway—he had lost all sense of time and place—the world only contained for him the woman who loved him—the woman who let him clasp her in his strong arm—let him press her sweet face to his.
And still from the distance came the sound of many waters, and the faint tinkle of the cowbells, and the song of the little black and white birds. The grave gray mountains seemed like strong and kindly friends who sheltered them and shut them in from all intrusion of the outer world, but they were so entirely absorbed in each other that they had not a thought of anything else.
“With you I shall have courage to begin life afresh,” he said, after a time. “To have the right to love you—to be always with you—that will be everything to me.”
And then as he thought of her true-hearted confession, he tried to understand a little better the unseen ordering of his life, and he loved to think that those weary years had been wasted neither on him nor on Cecil herself. He could not for one moment doubt that her pure, unselfish love had again and again shielded him from evil, that all through his English life, with its hard struggles and bitter sufferings, her love had in some unknown way been his safeguard, and that his life, crippled by the faithlessness of a woman, had by a woman also been redeemed. All his old morbid craving for death had gone; he eagerly desired a long life, that he might live with her, work for her, shield her from care, fill up, to the best of his power, what was incomplete in her life.
“I shall have a postscript to add to my letter,” said Cecil presently, looking up at him with the radiant smile which he so loved to see on her lips. “What a very feminine one it will be! We say, you know, in England, that a woman’s postscript is the most important part of her letter.”
“Will your father and mother ever spare you to me?” said Frithiof.
“They will certainly welcome you as their son,” she replied.
“And Mr. and Mrs. Horner?” suggested Frithiof mischievously.
But at the thought of the consternation of her worthy cousins Cecil could do nothing but laugh.
“Never mind,” she said, “they have always disapproved of me as much as they have of you; they will perhaps say that it is, after all, a highly suitable arrangement!”