"By Jove!" he exclaimed, and was silent. The pang of his loss was swallowed up in the amplitude of his wonder.
"Are you going to marry him, Molly?" he asked when the silence had become unbearable.
"If he wants me. I'm not quite sure that he wants me. I know he loves me," she added, "but that isn't just the same."
He did not answer, and they stood looking beyond the thick foliage in the Haunt's Walk, to the meadows, over which a golden haze shimmered as though it were filled with the beating of invisible wings.
"Molly," he said suddenly. "Shall I go after Blossom?"
"Oh, if you would, dear Jonathan," she answered.
Without a word, he turned from her and walked rapidly down the path
Blossom had followed.
When he had disappeared, Molly went up the walk to the Italian garden, and then ascending the front steps passed into the drawing room, where Kesiah and Mrs. Gay sat in the glow of a cedar fire, reading a new life of Lord Byron.
Kesiah's voice, droning monotonously like the loud hum of bees, rose above the faint crackling of the logs, on which Mrs. Gay had fixed her soft, unfathomable eyes, while she reconstructed, after the habit of her imagination, certain magnificent adventures in the poet's life.
"Have you seen Jonathan, Molly?" asked Kesiah, laying aside her book while Mrs. Gay wiped her eyes.