Perhaps he realised he was frightening and offending her, for, with that curious mixture of real ardour, passion, and cool, calculating intelligence, which is so marked a trait in most Southerners, he suddenly dropped her hands.
“Forgive me!” he cried pathetically. “I have been precipitate and selfish to-night. You are so good in allowing me to be your friend! It is well to begin with friendship when one aspires to love.”
And, as he had expected her to do, Lily eagerly met him half-way.
“I have always hoped you would be my friend,” she said sincerely. “Ever since I came here, ever since Aunt Cosy began talking about you to me, I hoped that if ever we met we should be real friends, Beppo.”
“I too hoped it,” he said earnestly. “Do you remember that drive we took, only a few days ago? As we talked I felt that my soul and your soul were one! We spoke so intimately; we said so many things that as a rule a young man and a young woman do not say to one another!”
“I don’t quite know what you mean,” said Lily uncomfortably.
“Surely you remember my telling you how little I understood papa and mamma? Should I have said that to one I did not trust? And then you told me of your lonely childhood, Lily,”—his voice dropped; it became very soft and caressing and gentle—“and I felt that we were truly friends henceforth!”
“Yes,” she said slowly, “I enjoyed that drive very much. And it’s quite true, Beppo, that I do like you very much more when you are—what shall I say?—sensible, than when you talk as you did just now.”
“My pure angel!” he exclaimed ecstatically. “You do not know what it means to me to hear you speak like this!” He added in a lower tone: “It shows me what, of course, I already knew—that no man has ever made love to you, my exquisite Lily. You are a fragrant flower, who, till now, has bloomed alone!”
And though Beppo’s words seemed to the girl walking by his side exaggerated, and even absurd, he uttered them in such a serious way and again Lily felt oddly touched. Poor Beppo! Perhaps he had never had a chance of a straightforward, happy friendship with a French or Italian girl.