“To say that you are an angel,” said I, “is to say a very commonplace thing, which every man says to the woman he either does, or affects to admire; and yet”——
“Nay,”—interrupted she, laying her hand on my arm, and looking up full in my face with that arch glance I have so often caught revelling in her eloquent eye—“I am not emulous of a place in the angelic choir; canonization is more consonant to my papistical ambition; then let me be your saint—your tutelar saint, and”—
“And let me,” interrupted I, impassionately, “let me, like the members of the Greek church, adore my saint, not by prostration, but by a kiss;”—and, for the first time in my life, I pressed my lips to the beautiful hand which still rested on my arm, and from which I first drew a glove that has not since left my bosom, nor been re-demanded by its charming owner.
This little freedom (which, to another, would have appeared nothing) was received with a degree of blushing confusion, that assured me it was the first of the kind ever offered; even the fair hand blushed its sense of my boldness, and enhanced the pleasure of the theft by the difficulty it promised of again obtaining a similar favour.
By heaven there is infection in the sensitive delicacy of this creature, which even my hardened confidence cannot resist.
No prieux Chevalier, on being permitted to kiss the tip of his liege lady’s finger, after a seven years’ seige, could feel more pleasantly embarrassed than I did, as we walked on in silence, until we were happily relieved by the presence of the old garrulous nurse, who came out in search of her young lady—for, like the princesses in the Greek tragedies, my Princess seldom appears without the attendance of this faithful representative of fond maternity.
For the rest of the walk she talked mostly to the nurse in Irish, and at the castle gate we parted—she to attend a patient, and I to retire to my own apartment, to ruminate on my morning’s ram ble with this fascinating lusus naturo.
Adieu,