A dainty prisoning indeed! The suggestion of it set his head whirling.
Like it!--His very admiration kept him silent.
"It makes it feel more real," she went on, "don't you think it does?"
Real, or a dream? He did not know which. He felt a fool to stand so silent; yet no words--as she would phrase it--came to match. None, at least, that he dare use to her unconscious dignity.
"Only I can't dance, you see," she continued, bending to look at the billows about her feet. "Besides,"--she looked up suddenly, her whole expression changed, she flung her fettered hands forward almost into his face. The strings on strings of scented flowers looping themselves in ever widening curves, hung like a screen between him and her laughter.
"I'm a prisoner--yours, I suppose." He fell back for half a second, then caught the hand in his.
And then, in an instant, it came back to him--the measureless glad content of that mistake in the dark! He had told himself ever since that it had come, then, by mistake--incomprehensible, it is true, horrible to a certain extent, but still in error. But this was no mistake!
"Yes!--my prisoner," he said. "Come, and sit down, and let us talk." He wanted time to think.
She shook her head. "Not here, please! No one is to see me but you, only you. That is why I waited till I saw you were alone. I only put it on for you to see."
A sudden remembrance of something she had said to him--"When it is real, and you give yourself--everything, and ask nothing." The certainty that she was doing this now made him say quickly:--