Christine said, “I wonder, Mr. Bacharach, whether you will do me a kindness?”
“You need not wonder. Of course I will, and gladly. What is it?”
“Read the whole poem aloud to me.”
Elias read it to her. He read it with a good deal of fervor. To be permitted to read aloud to her a poem fraught with intense passion like “The Blessed Damozel,” was the next best thing to being permitted to talk to her of his own love. And all the while, as he was reading, he was conscious of a dainty, subtle fragrance being wafted toward him from where his auditor was seated, and penetrating to his heart, and making it thrill. And whenever he lifted his eyes from off the page, they encountered hers, in the depths of which he could see burning a pale, strange fire; and again his heart vibrated with a keen, exquisite thrill.
When he had done, she exclaimed, softly but earnestly, “Oh, how beautifully you read it! You made me thrill so here,” placing her hand upon her breast.
At that he experienced the keenest and the most exquisite thrill of all.
Pretty soon. “Tell me,” she went on, “which one of Rossetti's poems do you like best of all?”
“Oh!” said he, “I should have hard work to choose. Yet, perhaps, I like 'The Bride's Prelude' as well as any. But which do you?”
“You'll laugh, if I tell you.”
“Oh, no, I sha'n't. Tell me, please.”