But he felt her soft icy hands tremble about his head, he felt her fluttering breath in his neck. She was kneeling beside him, saying in choked whispers in the intervals of lifting her poor lips from his wet face, "Don't speak!—Don't speak!"
She was straining him to her with a passionate tenderness never shown another being, raining on him the sweetest kisses.
Both fell to crying as if their hearts would break.
CHLOE, CHLORIS, AND CYTHEREA
To make you acquainted by sight with young Chloris: she was a tall girl, a trifle meagre in outline, but not disagreeably so; she had light reddish-brown hair, and a sprinkling of freckles on a peachy skin, and those eyes with dead-leaf spots in them; altogether an air of openness and intelligent goodness that had quickly thrown the newly introduced off the question—was she pretty? But she was pretty, too, at her hours.
On this day she had shut out the sun by means of the green Venetian blinds, and her room, like a submerged crystal chamber, was full of a watery light; she herself, white clothed, made a fair green-shadowy nymph in the dim green atmosphere.
This was her first hour of complete conscious content. So rich was she in content that she had set herself to perusing a volume of the driest essays, a present for a diligent girl graduate.
This sense of life unfolding like a normal flower and becoming the perfection of a rose was too much for the grateful heart to contemplate at its ease; some great demonstration towards God must follow on such contemplation. And Chloris in her security putting it off until bedtime, sat reading about the discipline of the will, the happy blood all the while keeping up in her veins a pleasant undercurrent babbling of other matters. Two hours more and the summer sun would be reaching its glorious haven, the cool flow in with the darkness, and time take up again that sweet scanning of the lines of her idyl....