She answered: “I ask myself how long this banishment is to last—this exile from joy.”
“Everything here has an end; the brighter side may come at last.”
“No, it will never come, it is all a mistake; even life itself.”
“Oh, don’t say that, Cherokee; I am with you. Don’t you care for——” Here he stopped, but she understood, and her answer, said in silence, was the sweetest word of all.
“I must speak this once at any cost—Great God! and forgive me, I love her so,” he whispered, as he seized her listless form, so unresisting, and wildly kissed her brow, her lips, her hair, her eyelids—sealed her to him by those caresses that were prompted by love’s unreasoning fury.
The whole earth revolved in one vast throb of song, and the wind, entuned, seemed to catch the music in its chase. Nothing under the sun could equal those moments with them.
At first they were so happy; then there came a desire—which comes to those of deep and tender sensibilities when their felicity becomes so acute that it verges upon pain—the desire, the involuntary longing, to die—an abandon of self—a forgetting.
In this moment of delirium he was the first to speak.
“I have known from the first that we were meant for each other.”
She did not answer; she was so thoroughly intoxicated just then, that if he should have dared to give her blows her heart would have arraigned him at its bar, with weeping paid the costs, and swore the blow was kind—she loved him so.