It would have been only for a moment. All he wanted was to take her in his arms an instant, and kiss her just once, and then he could have let her go forever, and counted himself a happy man to have lived that moment’s life. That was all; but that he felt himself in honor bound to renounce, because he believed her to be pledged to another man. And he had accomplished the renunciation; but now that this was so, he felt an impatient rebellion against further discipline. The resistless torrent of his love and despair rushed over him, and nothing should keep him from speaking! Words could do her no harm, and there were words that burnt upon his lips, whose utterance alone, it seemed to him, could keep his brain from bursting.
He opened his lips to speak, but the words refused to come. There was a spell in the silence that he felt powerless to break. The room was absolutely free from either sound or motion. Margaret had dropped her weary body sideways in the cushioned chair, with her long white robe sweeping behind her, and her face turned from him, so that only her profile was in view.
The young man stood and looked at her, possessed by the sense of her nearness, enthralled by the spell of her beauty. He could see the rise and fall of her bosom under its covering of silk and fur, and there was a dejectedness in her attitude that made a passionate appeal to his tenderness. She was very pale, and her lowered lids and a little drooping at the corners of her mouth gave her lovely face a most plaintive look. She was tired too; the inertness of the pliant figure, with the motionless bare arms and relaxed, half-open hands, showed that plainly enough. Fragile and slight and weary as she was, how could she endure the battle of life alone, and who, of all men in the world, could strive and struggle for her as he could? The thought of her woman’s weakness was a keen delight to him at that moment. He had never felt himself so strong. With a quick motion that emphasized his thought, without interrupting the stillness, he threw out his right arm and clinched his hand with a conscious pleasure in his strength. Nerves and veins and muscles seemed to tingle with sentient animal force.
All these excited thoughts passed through his brain with lightning-like swiftness, but now, at last, the silence was broken by a sound. It was a very gentle one—a short, faint sigh from Margaret; but its effect was powerful. It roused the young man from his absorption and recalled him to reality.
He sat down a little space away from her, and with his fervid eyes fixed on her pale profile and lowered lids, began to speak.
“It was an impulse, not a deliberate purpose, that made me call you back,” he said. “I should perhaps have done better to let you go, but I did not, and now you are here, and I am here, and we are alone in the stillness together, Margaret, and you will have to listen to what I have to say. I think you must know what it is. My efforts to keep the truth out of my eyes when I looked at you, and out of my voice when I spoke to you, have seemed to me miserable failures many a time, and I dare say you have known it all along.”
He paused a moment, still looking at her. There was not a quiver in the still face pressed against the cushions, but at his last words the beautiful arm was uplifted and laid against her cheek, hiding her face from view, as the slim hand closed upon the top of the chair, above her head. It was an attitude full of grace. The white wrap had fallen back, leaving bare the lovely arms and shoulders, and revealing perfectly the symmetry of the rounded figure. Although the face was hidden, he could see every exquisite line and tint of it, in his mind’s eye, almost as plainly as he saw, with his actual vision, the soft masses of hair drawn back from the little shell-like ear, and the portion of white cheek and throat which her screening arm did not conceal.
In spite of strong repression, the hot blood overflowed the young man’s bounding heart and sent a glow of dark color surging over his face. Something—a little fluttered movement of the breast—revealed to his confused consciousness that Margaret herself was not unmoved. He rose and advanced toward her.
“You know it,” he said; “but let me put into words the sweet, despairing truth. I love you, Margaret. Oh, good and beautiful and true and sweet, how could I choose but love you!”
He dropped upon his knees before her, and in this low position he could see her lovely, tremulous lips. At something in their expression a sudden little flame of hope shot up in his heart.