Jeremy shivered slightly and his wits began to return to him. “Will it be like—like this morning?” he enquired with a faint smile.
She smiled a little in reply. “Don’t you want us to be grateful to you?” she said. “You know what you have saved us from—all of us. How can we ever reward you?”
“That’s my chance,” Jeremy’s mind insisted again and again. “That’s my chance ... that’s my chance ... I ought to speak now.” But the short interval of her silence slipped away, and she went on gently:
“You must expect to be congratulated and toasted. Will you be strong enough to bear it? My father will be disappointed if you are not.”
It was at that moment, quite irrelevantly and by a process he did not understand, that Jeremy took the Lady Eva in his arms. Afterwards he had no consciousness, no recollection, of the instant in which their lips had met. There had simply been an insurgence of his passion and of his loneliness, ending in an action that blinded him. The next thing he remembered was folding her bowed head into his shoulder, stroking her smooth hair with a trembling hand, and muttering hoarsely and helplessly, “Dearest ... dear one....”
Then they were sitting side by side on the couch and their positions were reversed. His head lay on her shoulder, while her fingers moved gently up and down his cheek. He stayed thus for some minutes without speaking or moving. He had been in love before and had not escaped the mood in which young men picture the surrender of the beloved. He had even more than once, after a long or a short wooing, held a girl in his arms and kissed her. But he had never yet seen this sudden and astonishing transformation of a stranger, mysterious and incalculable, whose faults and peculiarities were as obvious as her beauty was enchanting, into a creature who could thus silently and familiarly comfort him. The moment before she had been some one else, the Lady Eva, a person as to whose opinion of himself he was uncertain and curious, that most baffling and impenetrable of all enigmas, another human being, divided from him by every barrier that looks or speech can put in the way of understanding. And now she was at once a lover, a part of himself, a spirit known by his without any need of words. He adjusted himself slowly to the miracle.
Presently he raised his head and searched her eyes keenly. She bore his gaze without flinching; and something again drew their mouths together. Then Jeremy said,
“I must speak to your father at once. Do you suppose he will feel that I have presumed on his gratitude to me?”
“I know he will not,” she answered. “I am sure he meant to give me to you. Do you think that otherwise....” She stopped, and there was a long pause. “But I wanted you ... first....” Again she could not go on, but began to sob a little, quietly. Jeremy, helpless and inexperienced, could think of nothing better to do than to gather her into his arms and kiss her hair. His sudden comprehension of her seemed to have vanished with as little warning as it came. She was again a mysterious creature; but now the mystery was a new one. He was like a man who, after the triumph of accomplishing a steep ascent, finds that he has reached no more than the first slope of the mountain.
When her face was hidden she continued with more confidence, but in a low and broken voice. “I wanted you to tell me that you ... wanted me, before my father gave me to you. I thought ... perhaps you did ... I hoped....” She freed herself from his arms and sat up, looking at him with proud eyes, though her face was blazing. “It is better than being given to you only as a reward for winning a battle,” she finished deliberately.