“No. I have accounted for the whole bulk, I believe.”
“How strange!”
“But now you must give me my guerdon,” said Hugh timidly.
The fact was, the poor youth had bargained, in a playful manner, and yet with an earnest, covetous heart, for one, the first kiss, in return for the poems she begged to see.
She turned her face towards him.
The second circumstance which makes the interview worth recording is, that, at this moment, three distinct knocks were heard on the window. They sprang asunder, and saw each other’s face pale as death. In Euphra’s, the expression of fright was mingled with one of annoyance. Hugh, though his heart trembled like a bird, leaped to the window. Nothing was to be seen but the trees that “stretched their dark arms” within a few feet of the oriel. Turning again towards Euphra, he found, to his mortification, that she had vanished—and had left the packet of poems behind her.
He replaced them in their old quarters in the escritoire; and his vague dismay at the unaccountable noises, was drowned in the bitter waters of miserable humiliation. He slept at last, from the exhaustion of disappointment.
When he awoke, however, he tried to persuade himself that he had made far too much of the trifling circumstance of her leaving the verses behind. For was she not terrified?—Why, then, did she leave him and go alone to her own room?—She must have felt that she ought not to be in his, at that hour, and therefore dared not stay.—Why dared not? Did she think the house was haunted by a ghost of propriety? What rational theory could he invent to account for the strange and repeated sounds?—He puzzled himself over it to the verge of absolute intellectual prostration.
He was generally the first in the breakfast-room; that is, after Euphra, who was always the first. She went up to him as he entered, and said, almost in a whisper:
“Have you got the poems for me? Quick!”