She could only smile her confirmation. No words could have told so clearly the sensuous delight that stilled her tongue. There was joy in her soft breathing, in the gently spreading nostrils, in the half-closed eyes. She was experiencing the unspeakable thrill that comes but once in the dream of love.
When he spoke, at uneven intervals, his voice was husky with the passion that consumed him.
Once he was saying: "It is too good to be true. I came unbidden, determined to learn how I stood with you. I could not wait. When I saw you to-day, I said to myself that you had grown away from me. I told myself I should have to win you all over again. You seemed unapproachable. You were so wonderful, Christine—so utterly beyond anything I had expected to find. I was alarmed, I was actually dismayed. But I told myself that I would win you; I would begin all over again and I—"
"You saw me to-day?" she interrupted in surprise. "Where?"
"I was waiting for you at the station—far back in the crowd. I wanted to see you in that way first. Your mother and I met there. She did not tell you. She asked me to come to-night, but she was careful to give me no hope. You will never know the doubts and fears that have beset me all this long evening. And then you came in. I was dazed. I was all a-tremble. And then to find that—that I had had all my fears for nothing! Why—why, I could have died for joy! You did not hesitate. You swept me off my feet. When you kissed me, Christine, I—I—it was as if night had turned to day in—"
"I have gone on loving you, David, from the beginning. There never has been a moment in which I have ceased to do so. Ah, you had nothing to fear. But I! Oh, my dear one, I was never free from doubt—never quite certain. You were so far above me that I—"
"Don't say that!"
"That I was sure you would not take our—our love dream seriously. When you came to be a man, with all that manhood meant to you, I felt somehow that you would forget the little circus girl who—"
He kissed her. Then she was silent for a long time.
"Your mother was telegraphing me to-day to come," he said after a time. "Did you know that she intended to do so?"