Rose threw out her hands to him. "Your happiness is perhaps too much to me, yet I would also make her happy in giving her to you. She is so restless, so wayward,—she does not know her own mind yet."
"She seems to be leading a pretty consistent course at present."
Rose's face was like an exquisitely tinted sky at sunrise. "Ah! this is wonderful, it overcomes me; and to think that I should not have suspected it! You adore this little Bidiane. She is everything to you, more than I am,—more than I am."
"I love you for that spice of jealousy," said Agapit, with animation. "Go home now, dear girl, and I will follow; or do you stay here, and I will start first."
"Yes, yes, go; I will remain a time. I will be glad to think this over."
"You will not cry," he said, anxiously, pausing with his hand on the door-knob.
"I will try not to do so."
"Probably I will have to give her up," he said, doggedly. "She is a creature of whims, and I must not speak to her yet; but I do not wish you to suffer."
Rose was deeply moved. This was no boyish passion, but the unspeakably bitter, weary longing of a man. "If I could not suffer with others I would be dead," she said, simply. "My dear cousin, I will pray for success in this, your touching love-affair."
"Some day I will tell you all about it," he said, abruptly. "I will describe the strange influence that she has always had over me,—an influence that made me tremble before her even when she was a tiny girl, and that overpowered me when she lately returned to us. However, this is not the occasion to talk; my acknowledgment of all this has been quite unpremeditated. Another day it will be more easy—"