“Rose, what makes your heart throb so violently?”
Rosalie raised her eyes to his face, and he noticed that a sorrowful shade dimmed their lustre for an instant, but vanished before the smile with which she replied—
“I am so glad to see you.”
“But your heart knocks so forcibly?”
“Come in the parlour, and let’s sit down there and talk—I have so many things to tell you, and to ask you about,” said Rosalie, evading his remarks; and gently withdrawing herself, she led the way into the parlour, and wheeled up an easy chair, and begged him to “sit down and make himself at home.”
But, first, he made her recline upon the lounge and rest, while he drew the chair up and sat by her side.
And there she lay, with her sweet, spiritual face, white as her drapery, except where all the colour had concentrated in a circumscribed fiery spot in either cheek. She was breathing short, yet smiling gaily at her own difficulty.
He sat watching her, and trying to feel and to look happy, yet thinking that after all she was not so well as when he had left her—perceiving that he had mistaken fever heat for healthful bloom. He sat, trying to smile and talk cheerfully, yet with a dull, aching prophecy in his heart. It was in vain to stifle the rising anxiety. It found some vent in these words:
“My love, you work too hard; that school is hurting your health?”
“No, dear Mark, believe me, it is not—it keeps me up.”