A faint smile played over the lips of the girl, but she whispered:
“When the torch is consumed to ashes, no power can rekindle the flame.”
“Do not speak despairingly, Hope. We will not rejoin those cold, hard hypocrites whom we both abhor. No, no; look up, my child; take heart, dear heart. We will build us up a bower in some lovely dell, where the birds shall sing all day, and innocent creatures resort for love of thee, and we will worship God with true hearts, and live as the beautiful Miranda of Shakespeare lived, only instead of Prospero it shall be Miranda and Ferdinand. Dost understand, love?”
While the sagamore thus poured out his poetic rhapsody with beaming eyes, and looks unutterably tender, Hope’s dreamy eyes were fixed on the vapors circling the falls, which were ever and anon swept aside by the gusty wind which stirred in the bare branches of the trees. It was evident that much in the mind of her lover was to her a sealed book. Perhaps John Bonyton felt something of the kind. Who has not, at some time, poured out the unfathomed wealth of a soul upon an arid desert!
Perhaps he felt that his thought was not her thought—his love was not her love, for he replied to the dreamy eyes:
“Yes, dear Hope, we will be content to think, not talk. Thou shalt call me brother, as in the olden time, and I thee, sister.”
“John Bonyton, Hope is no more than the old Hope. Thou art—right royal.”
And as if this expressed more to her than its words would seem to convey, she for the first time threw her arms about his neck. Then she pressed her lips to his in one wild, passionate burst, and withdrew herself from his arms.
“For the first and the last time,” she had exclaimed, “thus—thus do I steep my soul in thine. Now go—go; I can not live to see thee look with a weary heart—a half-heart, upon the Hope who is all thine.”