Both were young and both were handsome; the acquaintance so suddenly begun ripened rapidly: but Cecil, unmoved by the brilliant attractions of Margarita, and by the perilous influences of propinquity, never for a moment felt his heart waver in its loyalty to Mary, though he deemed her lost to him, and all other human love was dead in him now.
When the September evenings closed in, and the old lady, clad in costly velvet trimmed with beautiful fur from the Balkans, was reading her missal in a corner, Cecil and Margarita, if not at the piano, were generally seated close together—very close, an observer might have thought—at a tripod table of green marble, playing chess, he with his left hand, for the right was yet in a sling; and watching, which he could not fail to do, her lovely little hand, so white and delicate, a very model for a sculptor, pushing the pawns and knights about, while all was still without, save the flow of the Morava on its way to join the Danube.
Between these two, when the countess was not present, we are compelled to admit that the conversation sometimes waxed perilous, notwithstanding Cecil's resolute platonism, when the large liquid eyes of Margarita, under their thick dark fringes, met his, and her scarlet lips, which we have said were rather sensuous, quivered and smiled, with an expression all their own; and one of those perilous times was when, somehow, they fell on the subject of love—a natural one enough between a handsome young fellow and a beautiful woman.
'There are times,' said Cecil, after a pause, in reply to something Margarita had said, 'when men dare not love.'
'Dare not—when?' asked Margarita, as she made a false move, and had to play her king.
'I mean when to love is rashness, or would be presumption,' said he, thinking, as no doubt he was, of Mary and her vain old guardian.
'There may be rashness, but there is no presumption in any man offering his true and honest love to any woman—even a princess.'
'But would the princess accept it?' said Cecil.
'Perhaps,' replied Margarita, looking at him with one of her smiles, and then drooping her lashes; 'love is romance,' she added.
'Then I have lived the romance of my life,' said Cecil, a little bitterly, and perhaps unwisely, 'and have only its grim realities before me now.'