Tacita moved backward a step, and clouded over.
“Not so!” Dylar exclaimed. “It is precisely because your friendship is as delicate as a mist that I seek you, that I follow you. See that white cloud on the pine-tree yonder! It is like you. The tree-top, the topmost tree-top has caught and tries to hold it. Do you think that it would like to stay?”
“It stays!” she murmured; and a faint rose-hue over her face and neck and hands betrayed the sudden heart-throb. “It stays while it is held.”
Dylar looked at her with delight in his eyes.
“I am glad to have here at last the little girl of the baiocco,” he said. “I never forgot her. When I no longer saw her, she grew up in my mind. I fancied her saying to me across the world: ‘Why do you not come? I am no longer a child!’”
Tacita gave him a startled glance, and quickly turned her eyes away. Love the most ardent, the most impetuous, shone in his face.
“Tacita,” he said softly, “I am indeed a beggar now! But do not fear. I will wait for your answer; but I could not wait before letting you know surely that my fate is in your hands. And now, shall we go down?”
She turned to descend before him, but stopped, looking back over her shoulder with lowered eyes that did not see his face. “May I have just one little string of olive-blossoms?” she asked.
He gathered and gave it to her over the shoulder her cheek was touching. “Ask me for the tree!” he exclaimed.
“Let it be mine where it stands,” she said, hiding a smile, and taking a step forward.