"It depends——"
"There are enchantments that are only deepened and intensified by absence."
She had to confess that this was indubitable, and added vaguely that it was sad.
"My mother declares my passion to be an infatuation, a madness——"
"Perhaps it is, or a folly, or only a boy's fancy," she said, smiling softly, and then shrinking back in sudden terror.
For all at once he sprang to his feet, stamping and gesticulating, his face darkened and distorted with fury, clutching his head with both hands, with blazing eyes and gestures of indescribable scorn and anger. "Boy," he shouted, "boy! What immature, what puerile, breast could endure the strain of a passion so virile, so invincible, so beyond all conception, so far transcending anything that can possibly be imagined by any female mind, as this? Such a passion as mine is not to be trifled with, Madame; it is too mighty, too terrible in its virile power. Ah! if women did but know what depths they have power to stir in male hearts, what inextinguishable fires they have power to kindle!— Pardon me, Madame," he added, gasping, and all at once perceiving the deadly pallor and terrified gaze of Ermengarde's shrinking face, and the gestures with which she seemed to be vainly seeking some way of bodily escape from the explosion. "My transports render me ferocious, forgetful of the consideration due to your sex and weakness. There is more of the tiger than the boy in my ardent nature; my passionate adoration frightens you, as it devours, consumes, destroys me. Reassure yourself, dear Madame, I implore you. See, I am calm, penitent, desolated to have occasioned a momentary emotion of terror in a breast so gentle, in a heart so adorable, to which all homage, and consideration the most tender, is due."
So speaking, he sank gracefully before her, his voice now sweet and low, his gestures supplicatory, even caressing. "Pardon me," he murmured, with clasped hands and a face all sunshine, while poor Ermengarde was white and trembling and as scared as some small and mischievous boy meddling with prohibited gunpowder and hearing it bang and go off in all directions—"pardon me. The overwhelming force of my passion is my one, my ample, excuse."
She murmured faintly that there was nothing to pardon; only she hoped he would not do it again, and would he be so obliging as to rise from his penitential posture upon one knee? This he did with infinite grace, bowing low over her hand, which he appeared to kiss, wholly oblivious of the fact that the spot upon which this scene was enacted was raked by the fire of two blazing dark eyes from the office window.
Poor, frightened Ermengarde gasped a little, for it is one thing to be the object of a boy's distant, poetic homage and quite another to be raved at by a demented and exacting person, who describes himself as a tiger and his feelings as ferocious. She looked aimlessly over the lemons and olives to the deep dark blueness that glowed to a firm and rounded intensity against a pale sky, quite unable to put two words together, while M. Isidore, his eyes full of soft, inward light, and his features calm and composed as a sleeping babe's, looked as if nothing could disturb the sunny peace of his soul, and composedly suggested that they should continue to follow the melancholy experiences of "this poor M. Pellico," with which intention he took a seat at her side, and, placing the open book on the table between and before them, began to read aloud to ears confused with terror and remorse.
At this juncture the approach of Heinrich, the porter, not yet in his smart gold and green livery, but green-baize-aproned and shirt-sleeved, as his morning duties required, and with a curious smile in his great, soft, dark eyes, put a final stop to the Italian lesson by conveying a summons to the teacher to transact some homely business in those obscure back premises whither no visitor ever penetrated.