"No. There is one condition, of supreme importance. Ah! Miss Jessie, you understand. Will you listen to me?"
"I can't promise, but I'll try," said Jessie, in a faltering tone. Imperceptibly, as it were, she resumed her place in the chair, and waited. The sun was declining; a faint rumor of odd clucking cries came from the turkey-field at the end of the grounds; but otherwise the air was still, and a spicy coolness stole in to them from the pine-plantations and the distant Sound. "Now tell me," she said, softly.
You may be sure Lance eagerly complied. With an eloquence that had never been his before, he told her what he thought of her; how he loved her, and wished her to be his wife. In his confession he likewise mingled unpremeditated touches about the daisies and the pines, and all that marvel of nature of which they had been talking; and he made her see how to him she was the culminating blossom of creation.
"If you could only guess," he ended, hopeless of conveying all that he wished to, "what a delight your presence is to me—how it is almost enough just to look at you and watch every movement that you make!"
So fine and frank was Jessie's maiden mind, that she no longer thought of concealment. "Why, then you know," she answered, with the surprise of a child, "exactly how I feel about you!"
I do not care to describe what happened after that; for in the first place it belongs only to those two lovers, and in the second place I know it could not be described without tarnishing the pure beauty of it.
In the long interchange of confidences that followed their union, Lance was moved to tell Jessie of the woman he had seen in the moonlight, the night before. "Strange, that she should have made me think of you and of the old Wharton story, isn't it? Who do you suppose she could have been?"
"I can't imagine," said Jessie. "Perhaps you had a moonstroke; isn't there such a thing? Or, perhaps it was a ghost."
When they came in to tea they found the colonel carefully dozing over the market columns of his newspaper. "May I go and get the ring?" whispered Lance, who had owned to her the secret of his hopeful purchase.
Jessie gave a silent assent. He returned quickly, and slipped the emblem on to her finger.