The word “thee” escaped her lips just as simply and easily as if they had been old comrades.
“Have you got the letter?”
“Here it is.”
Mariana scanned the letter and looked up at him almost reverently.
“Do they entrust you with such important commissions?”
He smiled in reply and put the letter back in his pocket.
“How curious,” he said, “we have come to know of our love, we love one another—and yet we have not said a single word about it.”
“There is no need,” Mariana whispered, and suddenly threw her arms around his neck and pressed her head closely against his breast. They did not kiss—it would have seemed to them too commonplace and rather terrible—but instantly took leave of one another, tightly clasping each other’s hands.
Mariana returned for the candle which she had left on the window-sill of the empty room. Only then a sort of bewilderment came over her; she extinguished the candle and, gliding quickly along the dark corridor, entered her own room, undressed and went to bed in the soothing darkness.