"All the better!"
A gentle pressure of her round arm rewarded Oswald for the compliment.
They had reached the town gate, walking rapidly but saying little to each other. As soon as they were outside the town they began to walk more slowly, as if by concert. Oswald felt that the young beauty who hung on his arm was in his power--that it depended on him to make her happy--in her sense of the word, at least. The virtuous impulse which he had felt just now, and which had been produced partly by the pride of self-respect, had long since passed away. Emily's coquettish charms, whose power he had already once felt overwhelming in the window-niche at Barnewitz, had not failed to have their effect upon his wavering but extremely susceptible nature; and if he even thought at that moment of the greater beauty of Helen, and of what he called his true love, for which he had sacrificed so much--alas! so much!--this served after all only to make the sweetness of a stolen and half-forbidden passion all the more intoxicating.
"Are you still angry, Emily?" he said, with the most insinuating tone of his sweet, deep voice.
"I--and angry?" replied Emily, and she came up closer and closer to her companion; "can we be angry where we would love, love always, love inexpressibly, and----"
"And what, sweetest?"
"Perhaps be loved a little in return!"
The words sounded so childlike, good, and true, that Oswald could not understand how he had ever been able to reject the love of this most charming creature.
"And yet," he said, "you were once angry with me; and you had cause! I swear it by that heaven which was then looking down upon us with its golden stars! How shall I make amends, oh sweet one! for what--oh! I cannot bear to think of that night at the ball at Grenwitz!"
"Really!" replied Emily, merrily; "oh, then it is all right again. Then I will not be sorry for anything that has happened since."