“Forgive you!” replied Charles, in a tone of awed astonishment. “Can you forgive me? I was a brute—a fool—I was not worthy to love you.”
A most gentlemanly spirit it seemed to be. Mivanway forgot to be afraid of it.
“We were both to blame,” answered Mivanway. But this time there was less submission in her tones. “But I was the most at fault. I was a petulant child. I did not know how deeply I loved you.”
“You loved me!” repeated the voice of Charles, and the voice lingered over the words as though it found them sweet.
“Surely you never doubted it,” answered the voice of Mivanway. “I never ceased to love you. I shall love you always and ever.”
The figure of Charles sprang forward as though it would clasp the ghost of Mivanway in its arms, but halted a step or two off.
“Bless me before you go,” he said, and with uncovered head the figure of Charles knelt to the figure of Mivanway.
Really, ghosts could be exceedingly nice when they liked. Mivanway bent graciously towards her shadowy suppliant, and, as she did so, her eye caught sight of something on the grass beside it, and that something was a well-coloured meerschaum pipe. There was no mistaking it for anything else, even in that treacherous light; it lay glistening where Charles, in falling upon his knees had jerked it from his breast-pocket.
Charles, following Mivanway’s eyes, saw it also, and the memory of the prohibition against smoking came back to him.
Without stopping to consider the futility of the action—nay, the direct confession implied thereby—he instinctively grabbed at the pipe, and rammed it back into his pocket; and then an avalanche of mingled understanding and bewilderment, fear and joy, swept Mivanway’s brain before it. She felt she must do one of two things, laugh or scream and go on screaming, and she laughed. Peal after peal of laughter she sent echoing among the rocks, and Charles springing to his feet was just in time to catch her as she fell forward a dead weight into his arms.