“Margaret,” he said, in a deep, commanding tone that was almost stern, while all the time his hands were clinched together, so that he touched not so much as the hem of her dress—“Margaret, look at me. Let me see straight into your eyes.”
There was no disobeying that tone, which he now used to her for the first time. She felt herself mastered by it, and, lowering her arm, she showed to him her loving eyes, her trembling lips, her entranced and radiant face. Instantly his arms were around her, his lips to hers, in an embrace so tender, a kiss so sweet, as can come only in that rare union of freshness and completeness for which all the past lives of these two young souls had been a preparation.
“You were wrong. I did not know,” she said, presently, breaking the long silence and murmuring the words very softly in his ear.
“Then you have been dull and blind and deaf, my darling, my darling, my darling!” he said, lingering caressingly upon the repetition of the poor little word, which is the best we have to convey the tenderest message of our hearts. “Do you know it now, or do you need to have it proved to you still further? Let me look at you.”
But she would not lift her head from its safe and happy resting-place, and her eyes refused to meet his until he said again:
“Margaret,” in that stern, sweet voice which thrilled and conquered her; and then she lifted up her eyes, and fixed them with a fervent gaze on his.
“God help me to deserve you, Margaret, my saint,” he murmured, as he met that look of lovely exaltation. “It hurts me that you have to stoop so far.”
“I do not stoop,” she answered. “You have pointed me to heights I never dreamed of. We will try to reach them together.”
Later, when their long talk, including the short explanation of their misunderstanding, was over, and they were parting for the night, with the blessed consciousness that they would meet to-morrow in the same sweet companionship—with the thought in the mind of each that the future was to be always together, never apart, Louis went with her into the hall, to watch her again as she ascended the stairs.