'Forget it now,' she replied softly.
'Can I do otherwise?' he asked, as he read the shy light in downcast eyes. 'But oh, Mercedes, if—if——'
'What?'
'But I must not think it now—if your sweet lips should be but tricking me again!'
'Oh, think not so!'
Round hers his hand closed once again, and with its clasp came the earnest of a promise that each would never fail the other again; and then a great brightness seemed suddenly to fall upon the hearts and lives of both.
'Oh face so loved in the past time!' said Kinloch, as he drew her towards him and kissed her fondly, to the growing amazement of Dolores, who was about to enter the room, but withdrew softly, her heart tremulous with joy, though laughing, as a young girl is sure to do, at what she deemed a pair of elderly lovers; and yet the General was barely in his fortieth year.
It seemed to her that his resentment against her sex in general, and against widows in particular, had evaporated very quickly!
The General had felt the cold coquetry of Mercedes in the past—her desertion of him—too keenly, not to be deeply stirred and to feel her influence now.
The old love that in his heart had never died, but had been curiously woven up with a species of hate, came to the surface once more, and the assurance of it was flattering to the still beautiful Mercedes. 'Love,' it is said, 'cannot be measured by time; it springs up like fungus in the night. It flourishes apace, and, like the wind, none know whence it cometh, or whither it goeth.'