“For you.”
“Well, I must confess that she plainly told me so,” laughed Harper; “but I thought very little about the matter, although at the time I was rather astonished.”
“I can understand that. But, however lightly you may treat the matter, it is a very serious affair with her.”
“But what authority, my friend, have you for speaking so definitely?”
“The authority of personal experience. I spent some years in Cashmere, attached to the corps of a surveying expedition. The women there are full of romantic notions. They live in a land that is poetry itself. They talk in poetry. They draw it in with every breath they take. Their idiosyncrasies are peculiar to themselves, for I never found the same characteristics in any other nation’s women. They are strangely impetuous, strong in their attachments, true to their promises. And the one theme which seems to be the burden of their lives is love.”
“And a very pretty theme too,” Harper remarked.
“When once they have placed their affections,” Martin went on, without seeming to notice the interruption, “they are true to the death. And if the object dies, it is seldom a Cashmere woman loves again. But when they do, the passion springs up, or rather, is instantly re-awakened. There are some people who affect to sneer at what is called ‘love at first sight.’ Well, I don’t pretend to understand much about the mysterious laws of affinity, but the women of Cashmere are highly-charged electrical machines. The latent power may lie dormant for a long time, until the proper contact is made—then there is a flash immediately; and, from that moment, their hearts thrill, and throb, and yearn for the being who has set the power in motion.”
“But you don’t mean to say that I have aroused such a feeling in Haidee’s breast?”
“I do mean to say so.”
“Poor girl!” sighed Harper, “that is most unfortunate for her.”