“We might try it, Gerald. Then if it didn’t work well, if I found I was all the time outraging your sensibilities, and you hurting my feelings, we’d call it off. In any case we’d give ourselves plenty of time to realize our foolishness. And you’d promise that when the time came you’d go like a lamb, with a pleasant face, not saving up anything against me. Make up your mind, now, that it’ll have to be a long, long engagement–if we don’t repent and break it off inside a week. But as it seems so likely we will, let’s don’t tell the others right off, Gerald; not, anyhow, for a week or ten days.”
“Admired Aurora, it surely is the most immoral proposition that ever came from fair lady so well brought up as you!” cried Gerald, in a proper state of excitement. But yet, such were his limitations, nothing in any proportion with the throbbing fire inside him, the immensity of his incredulous joy, appeared on his outside, where merely the mollified lines of his face gave him a look of greater youth, and his cool-colored eyes let through a faint testimony of the inward light. “I accept without hesitation. I promise whatever you ask. From this moment onward we are fidanzati, then. And, my blessed Auroretta, you who are such a hand at calling names, have your servant’s permission to call him all the names you can think of that signify an ineffable blunderer on the day when you succeed in freeing yourself from him!”
Many more things were said, not worth recording. But at last devout silence reigned. In the twilight room, with 431all the bad pictures and trivial ornamentation, to shut out the offense of which he had once closed his eyes, Gerald now closed them again to concentrate more perfectly upon the rapture of feeling Aurora’s shoulder beneath his cheek.
432CHAPTER XXIV
The servant who opened the door for Leslie on this softly brilliant June morning, being well accustomed to admitting her, obligingly anticipated her question, “Are the ladies at home?”
“The signorina is in the salottino,” he said. From which Leslie understood that the person whom she chiefly had come to see was out. It did not really matter, for she had time to wait. Aurora was likely to come back for lunch.
She released the man from attendance by a little wave of her hand, “Never mind announcing me!” and directed her footsteps toward the tall white-and-gold door standing partly open.
On her way to it she picked up off the floor a small lawn handkerchief.
The ball-room impressed her anew as being very vast, very empty, furnished almost solely as it was by the sparkling chandeliers, every pendant of which to-day was gay with reflections of the green and flowery and sun-washed outdoors.