And still he hesitated. “What is wrong with you?” she asked in most womanly anxiety.
“You are so much above me,” vehemently and brokenly, “I am not fit for you. You are like something holy. I dare not touch you.”
“You will get over that,” she said, shaking her head and smiling happily; “and I wish I were half as good as you fancy me. Come, dear lad, I will make the first advance. Here is a betrothal kiss for you; and then you must go home.”
She got up, and for the first time the dimpled cheek was laid willingly against his, her arm slipped around his neck, and like a man in a trance of painful ecstasy he pressed his lips to the beloved head laid upon his breast, and heard her sweet lips murmur a tender prayer for a blessing on their united lives.
Then with a passionate embrace and a heartfelt cry of “Unworthy, unworthy,” he hurried in his tumultuous fashion from the room.
CHAPTER XXXI
MACDALY’S LECTURE
Various apocryphal stories are told of Brian Camperdown’s doings on the night that Stargarde Turner promised to be his wife. It is said that his blood being in too much of a tumult to allow him to enter his house and go to sleep, he started on a joyful and eccentric pilgrimage around the peninsula on which the city of Halifax is built.
Not satisfied with tramping over the dark and muddy roads of the Park, and the quiet streets of the city, he is said to have proceeded along the shores of Bedford Basin, and on the spot where more than a hundred years ago dead French soldiers, unhappy members of the expedition of 1746, were discovered sitting under the trees, their useless muskets by their sides—he, by a fitful gleam of moonlight, carved his own and Stargarde’s initials on the smooth-coated bark of a maple.
A story also exists of his having been seen eight miles farther on, and of his startling a watcher by a sick-bed by a glimpse of his ecstatic face looking through the cottage window; but this one is uncertain, and has never been corroborated.
Certain it is, however, that at daylight he returned home neither footsore nor weary and still in his state of exaltation. He let himself in by means of a latch-key, made an elaborate and prolonged toilet, then restlessly haunted the lower rooms of the house, waiting for some one to wake up to whom he could impart his joyful intelligence.