The last exclamation was uttered aloud, and with an undisguised accent of anguish.
Smythje heard it, and started as he did so—letting the sun-glass fall from his fingers.
Looking around, he perceived his companion standing apart—unheeding as she was unheeded—with head slightly drooping, and eyes turned downward upon the rock—her face still bearing the expression of a profound anguish which her thoughts had called forth.
The heart of Smythje melted within him. He knew her complaint—he knew its cure. The remedy was in his hands. Was it right any longer to withhold it? A word from him, and that sad face would be instantly suffused with smiles! Should that word be spoken or postponed?
Spoken! prompted humanity. Spoken! echoed Smythje’s sympathetic heart. Yes! perish the cue and the climax! Perish the fine speech and the rehearsal with Thoms—perish everything to “relieve the deaw queetyaw fwom the agony she is suffwing!”
With this noble resolve, the confident lover stepped up to the side of his beloved, leaving a distance of some three feet between them. His movements were those of a man about entering upon the performance of some ceremonial of the grandest importance; and to Mr Smythje, in reality, it was so.
The look of surprise with which the young Creole regarded him, neither deterred him from proceeding, nor in anywise interfered with the air of solemn gravity which his countenance had all at once assumed.
Bending one knee down upon the rock—where he had dropped the glass—and placing his left hand over the region of his heart, while with the right he had raised his hat some six inches above his perfumed curls, there and then he was about to unburden himself of that speech, studied for the occasion—committed to Smythje’s memory, and more than a dozen times delivered in the hearing of Thoms—there and then was he on the eve of offering to Kate Vaughan his hand—his heart—his whole love and estate—when just at this formidable crisis, the head and shoulders of a man appeared above the edge of the rock, and behind, a black-plumed beaver hat, shadowing the face of a beautiful woman!
Herbert Vaughan!—Judith Jessuron!