With an uncontrollable impulse he leaned to her and clasped both her hands.
“You cared, Teresa,” he said. “You risked so much—for me?”
He had spoken her name again. Again she felt the stab of that quivering spear of gladness. Her fingers fluttered in his.
“Yes—yes!” she whispered. The shouts, the music, the surge and laughter around, faded. She felt herself, unafraid, drifting on a sea of unplummetted depths.
A shock of fright brought her to herself. A man bent and dressed richly, with an affectation of youth, was passing, attended by a servant. As they approached, the keen-eyed servitor had pointed out Gordon. “That is the evil Englishman, Excellence, of whom you have heard,” he had said, and the old noble he led had set his keen eyes on the other with a chuckling relish.
Teresa, in the momentary pause they made, hardly repressed a cry, for that moment discovery seemed to her imminent. The old man was the Count Guiccioli—he who had leaned that afternoon from the palazzo balcony. Her pulses leaped to panic. She felt as if that sharp gaze must go through the veil, and pressed closer to Gordon.
But master and servant passed on, and her fear fainted out.
The man beside her had felt that quick pressure, and instinctively the touch of his arm reassured her, though he had not surmised her alarm. In that instant Gordon had been thinking like lightning. A temptation had sprung full-statured before him. In a flash he had read the dawning secret behind those eyes, the sweet unspoken things beneath those trembling lips crimson-soft as poppy leaves. To possess this heart for his own! Not to tell her who he was—not yet, when her purity would shrink—to nurture this budding regard with meetings like this, stolen from fate—to cherish it till it burst into flower for him, all engrossing, supreme! To make this love, fluttering to him unsought in the purlieus of his soul’s despair, his solace and his sanctuary!
Coincidence grappled with him—a stealthy persuasion. In the crisis of his madness, when at Geneva he had cursed every good thing, her pictured face had sought him out to go with him. Into the nadir of his degradation there in Venice it had dropped like a falling star to call him to himself. Fate had led him to her in the woods of La Mira—had brought them both face to face at the shop in the piazzetta—and now had led her to him again here in the midst of the maskers. It was Kismet!
“I did not think there was more than one in all the world who would have done what you have to-night!” he said; “that would have cared if I lived or died! Why do you care?”