"Promise me! You don't know why I ask you, why I beg of you to promise that. It is not for my own sake," he urged.
"I promised you that long ago—the first time we ever met," said the girl, and cowered close to him.
They drew apart, and stood up.
Holding him by the hand, she followed him to the door. Then flinging her arms about his neck, she clung to him as if she would never let him go. He took her in his arms, himself on the point of swooning; he felt her hair wet with tears against his cheek, and their lips met.
The girl's head was bent back, looking, not into his eyes as before, but upward. And he saw how the look in her eyes changed, first to ineffable tenderness, then to pious prayer—until it seemed freed from all earth, gazing at some blessed vision afar off. As long as she stood thus he could not move a limb. Then her eyelids quivered, closed—and she drew her lips away.
He looked at them, saw a white, bloodless line—and he felt in that moment as if some ineradicable, eternal seal had been pressed upon his own.
"I can't leave you like this!" he cried desperately. "Look! To-night we shall be at Kirveskallio—I can come from there. And I will come every night as long as we are within reach."
The girl's face lit with a pale gleam as of autumn sunlight, but she said no word. Only looked at him strangely, as he had never seen her look before—and stood there, gazing at him still, as he passed out.
ROWAN
"Rowan—do you know why I call you so?" he asked, holding the girl's hand clasped in his.