“I shall grow strong now,” she said, half shyly; “but why do you call me child?”
She looked up in his face with a smile, half playful, half tender—a look that made him shiver.
“You are not cross with me?” she said, gazing at him piteously.
“Cross? No,” he said, gently.
And he once more took her hand, trying hard to begin that which he had brought her there to tell, but as far off as ever. At the end of a minute, though, she gave him the opportunity, by saying naïvely—
“You have never told me anything about yourself. Mamma wondered what you were—so different to everybody we meet.”
“Let me tell you, Netta,” he said, earnestly. “And promise me this—that we are still to be great friends.”
She looked at him wonderingly.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Why should we not be? You have always been so kind.”
He paused for a moment or two; and then, there in the calm of that shadowy wood, with the sunbeams coming like golden arrows through the leafy boughs, and the distant twitter of some bird for interruption, he told her of his own life and troubles, watching her bright, animated face as she listened eagerly, sometimes laying her hand confidingly upon his arm, till his tale approached the chapters of his love; and now, impassioned in his earnestness, he half forgot the listener at his side, till, in the midst of his declaration of love and trust and fidelity to Valentina Rea, he became aware of a faint sigh, and he had just time to catch the poor girl as she was slipping from the tree trunk to the ground.