“But why do you stay here, if you fancy you are not welcome?” asked Pennell, earnestly, “you are not dependent on these people or their hospitality.”
“But where am I to go?” said the girl, “I know no one in London, and Miss Wynward says that I am too young to live at an hotel by myself!”
“Miss Wynward is quite right! You are far too young and too beautiful. You don’t know what wicked men and women there are in the world, who would delight in fleecing an innocent lamb like you. But I can soon find you a home where you could stay in respectability and comfort, until—until——”
“Until what,” asked Harriet, with apparent ingenuousness, for she knew well enough what was coming.
They were seated on one of those little couches made expressly for conversation, where a couple can sit back to back, with their faces turned to one another. Harriet half raised her slumbrous black eyes as she put the question, and met the fire in his own. He stretched out his arms and caught her round the waist.
“Hally! Hally! you know—there is no need for me to tell you! Will you come home to me, dearest? Don’t ever say that you are friendless again! Here is your friend and your lover and your devoted slave for ever! My darling—my beautiful Hally, say you will be my wife—and make me the very happiest man in all the world!”
She did not shrink from his warm wooing—that was not her nature! Her eyes waked up and flashed fire, responsive to his own; she let her head rest on his shoulder, and turned her lips upwards eagerly to meet his kiss, she cooed her love into his ear, and clasped him tightly round the neck as if she would never let him go.
“I love you—I love you,” she kept on murmuring, “I have loved you from the very first!”
“O! Hally, how happy it makes me to hear you say so,” he replied, “how few women have the honesty and courage to avow their love as you do. My sweet child of the sun! The women in this cold country have no idea of the joy that a mutual love like ours has the power to bestow. We will love each other for ever and ever, my Hally, and when our bodies are withered by age, our spirits shall still go loving on.”
He—the man whose whole thoughts hitherto had been so devoted to the task of ameliorating the condition of his fellow-creatures, that he had had no time to think of dalliance, succumbed as fully to its pleasures now, as the girl whose life had simply been a ripening process for the seed which had burst forth into flower. They were equally passionate—equally loving—equally unreserved—and they were soon absorbed in their own feelings, and noticed nothing that was taking place around them.