The speaker was a girl scarcely past childhood, young, beautiful, good, wealthy, and yet—desperate, as not only her words, but her every look, tone, and gesture proved.
Her voice was low, her tone steadied by a powerful self-control. She stood there with a pale horror, yet fixed resolution, on her face; as one might stand on the deck of a burning ship, wrought up to choose death between fire and water, ready to escape the flames by plunging into the sea.
He to whom she spoke was a poor fisherman on the estate, young, strong, healthy and handsome, with the good looks that youth and health give, but bronzed by exposure, roughened by toil and rudely clothed.
The scene of this strange interview was a small, sandy island on the coast of Maryland. The time, an overclouded and blustering morning near the end of January.
He had been hard at work mending his boat, which lay bottom upwards on the beach, when she came suddenly upon him.
Then he stood up, took off his old tarpaulin hat, and respectfully waited her orders.
What a contrast they formed, as they stood there facing each other—she, the delicate, patrician beauty, wrapped in richest furs and finest velvets, yet with that look of pale horror and fixed resolution on her beautiful face—he, the hardy son of the soil, bronzed and rugged, clothed in a rough pea-jacket and loose corduroy trowsers, with their legs tucked into high, coarse, bull-hide boots; robust, erect, cordial, yet with a look of unbounded astonishment in his fine dark eyes.
They might have been the last young man and maiden left in the world, for all sign of human life or habitation near them, as they stood on that little sterile isle—around them the dark-gray sea roughened by a high wind—behind them the mainland in its wintry aspect of skeleton forests, rising from snow-clad hills.
“David Lindsay, will you marry me?” repeated the girl, seeing that he had not answered her question, but stood before her dumfounded with amazement.
“Miss de la Vera!” was all that he could utter, even now.