Theodore permitted her to get up, and with staggering step she took her position at the tree trunk.
Then he sank down, hot blood coursing through his veins. Long ago he had realized in Jinnie and the fiddle essentials—essentials to his future and his happiness, and to-day her kisses and divine, womanly yielding had only strengthened that realization. Nothing now was of any importance to him save this vibrant, temperamental girl. There was something so delightfully young—so pricelessly dear in the way she had surrendered herself to him. The outside world faded from his memory as Jinnie closed her eyes, and with a very white face began to play. For that day she had finished with the song of the fairies, the babbling of the brook, and the nodding rhythm of the flowers in the summer’s breeze. All that she considered now was Theodore and his kisses. The bow came down over a string with one long, vibrating, passionate call. It expressed the awakening of the girl’s soul—awakened by the touch of a man’s turbulent lips—Jinnie’s God-given man. Her fiddle knew it—felt it—expressed it!
With that first seductive kiss the soul-stirring melody was full born within her, as a world is called into the firmament by one spoken word of God. And as she played, Theodore moved silently toward her, for the fiddle was flashing out the fervor of the kisses she had given him. 219
He was close at her feet before he spoke, and simultaneously the white lids opened in one blue, blue glance.
“Jinnie!” breathed Theodore, getting up and holding out his arms. “Come to me! Come to me, my love! I can’t live another moment without you.”
The bow and fiddle remained unnoticed for the next half hour, while the two, the new woman and the new man, were but conscious of one another, nothing else.
At length Theodore spoke.
“Jinnie, look up and say, ‘Theodore, I love you’.”
It was hard at first, because her mind had never reached the point of speaking aloud her passionate love for him, but Theodore heard the halting words, and droned them over to himself, as a music lover delights in his favorite strains.
“And you love me well enough to marry me some day?” he murmured.