The exclamation held trenchant pain—something else, too, that for the life of him he could not repress. It pierced her with a darting rapture.
Since that hour at the monastery, with its pang and its reassurance, as she felt budding those new, mysterious flowers of faith and heart experience, she had felt a deeper unguessed want. Over and over she had repeated to herself the last words he had said before that painful interruption: “Because it was a prayer of yours for me.” Her soul had been full of a vague, unphrased yearning for all the meanings that might lie unexpressed in the coupling of those two words. So now, as she heard him speak her name in that shaken accent, her heart thrilled.
“Ah,” she breathed, “then you care—so much?”
His fingers clenched. He was torn with two emotions: self-abasement, and a hungry desire, lashed by propinquity, to take her in his arms, to defy vow and present, be the consequence what it might. There came upon him again the feeling that had gripped him when she stood with him among the circling maskers, violet-eyed, lilac-veined, bright with new impulses, passionate and lovely. He leaned toward her. If she but knew how he cared!
A sound startled them both. Her hand grasped his with apprehensive fingers as she listened. “Look! There beyond the hedge. A shadow moved.”
He looked. Only an acacia stirred in the light air.
“It is nothing,” he reassured her. “Tita is at the gate.”
“Oh,” she said fearfully, “I should not have said come. There is risk for you here.”
“What would I not have risked?”
“Listen!”