“I have told a falsehood to your parents.”
“Yes, I know it,” she said as she smiled.
“No, you do not know it; you could not possibly know it, for all that happened too long ago. I only paint on glass for my own pleasure, and as a simple amusement; you really ought to be told of that.”
Then, with a quick movement, she put her hand on his mouth, as if she wished to prevent this explanation.
“I do not care to hear any more. I have been expecting you. I knew that sooner or later you would come, and you have done so. That is all-sufficient.”
They talked no longer for a while. That little hand over his lips seemed almost too great a happiness for him.
“When the right time comes, then I shall know all. Yet I assure you that I am ignorant of nothing connected with you, for everything had been revealed to me before our first meeting. You were to be, and can be, only the handsomest, the richest, and the most noble of men, the one above all others; for that has ever been my dream, and in the sure certainty of its full accomplishment I wait calmly. You are the chosen hero who it was ordained should come, and I am yours.”
A second time she interrupted herself in the tremor of the words she pronounced. She did not appear to say them by herself alone; they came to her as if sent by the beautiful night from the great white heavens, from the old trees, and the aged stones sleeping outside and dreaming aloud the fancies of the young girl. From behind her voices also whispered them to her, the voices of her friends in the “Golden Legend,” with whom she had peopled the air and the space around her. In this atmosphere she had ever lived—mysticism, in which she revelled until it seemed fact on one side, and the daily work of life on the other. Nothing seemed strange to her.
Now but one word remained to be said—that which would express all the long waiting, the slow creation of affection, the constantly increasing fever of restlessness. It escaped from her lips like a cry from a distance, from the white flight of a bird mounting upward in the light of the early dawn, in the pure whiteness of the chamber behind her.
“I love you.”