She was so fair and sweet, so charming and gracious, so pre-eminently and perfectly desirable. It was highest and keenest delight—delight so keen that at times it had in it the elements of pain—simply to watch the play of her face, so eloquently responsive to the quick emotional soul within,—the large dark eyes so clear and frank, so unreservedly trustful of him.
He would sooner die than forfeit one iota of the honour her faith conferred on him. And that great springing hope of his must be carefully covered and concealed, until such time as he should discover in her eyes the outlook of a hope responsive.
It would come. It would come, he said to himself—in time—when she should have come to know him still better and to trust him still more fully—to the uttermost.
For the ultimate goal of his desire was, in the manner of its possible attainment at all events, somewhat nebulous to him, though it set the whole distant future ablaze with rosy fires. In the nature of things, circumstanced as they were, such ultimate attainment, if ever it were reached, could be reached only by the treading of unusual ways. And to require that of any girl—and especially of a girl such as this, high-born, intelligent beyond most, and deeply versed in the great world's ways—was asking of her more than any true man, truly loving, could bring himself to ask,—unless to both their hearts no other thing were possible,—unless the barrier of Circumstance left no other possible hope or way.
And for the proving of that, Time held the keys and must have his say.
He wondered often, and with keenest anxiety, if her heart could possibly have come through all the strange experiences of her previous life unchallenged, unassailed, unwon. Seeing that she was what she was it seemed to him almost impossible.
She was to him so compact of goodness and beauty, so fashioned to bewitch, that he could not imagine any man impervious to her grace and charm. What manner of men could they be who, consorting with her daily and on terms of equality, had failed to capture a heart so made for loving?
He recalled in minutest detail all she had told him of her past life and friends and acquaintances, figured them all in his mind, weighed them jealously in the scales of his own devotion, and could not discover one trace of emotion towards one or another, but rather of aversion towards all.
Again and again she had expressed the joy she had felt at the prospect of her escape to a freer and larger life. It was, of course, not impossible that that feeling might but hide some heart-breaking disappointment of the earlier times. But he did not think so. She was to him truth personified, though still a woman. He believed in her absolutely, as a man should in the woman who holds his heart. So far as assurance could go,—without the definite question which he longed to put but did not yet dare, lest the hopeful anxiety of his present state should be turned to hopeless regret,—he felt fairly safe in building on a rosy future.
How she regarded himself he could not surely say. But she trusted him and that was a good foundation for his building.