She started and looked up at him, wondering at the strong emotion in his voice. Their eyes met, and he said, huskily:
“Your lover.”
He stopped then, carried away by a swift rush of emotion. Catching her hands in his, as he had done several times before under the stress of strong feeling, he asked:
“Do you comprehend me, Sweetheart? I love you, not as I pretended—with a brother’s love—but with the truest and deepest passion my heart has ever known. Can you love me in return? Will you be my wife?”
He felt the trembling of the graceful form as he held tight to the little hands. Her face drooped, and a wave of roseate color swept from chin to brow. Thea could scarcely look at him, but it was impossible for her to speak, so she lifted her downcast lids, and gave him a swift, quickly withdrawn glance so full of exquisite joy and love that he could not doubt the story told him by those deep violet eyes.
With a thrill of rapture he drew his little love close to his breast, and pressed a lover’s passionate kiss on her yielding and responsive lips.
Faint with excess of joy, she lay still in his passionate clasp. Oh, the sweetness of that moment! Could she ever forget it? There rushed over her all the love songs, all the poetry she had ever read; but it seemed to the girl that all were tame in their descriptions of happy love. Perhaps it was beyond description. She felt quite sure that she herself could never have found words strong enough in which to describe the indescribable rapture of that moment when she leaned, blushing and palpitating, upon her lover’s breast, with his lips on hers, and his arms clasping her so close, so tight, while between passionate kisses he called her, “Love, darling, wife!”
CHAPTER XLV.
Thea was dressing for the ball. It took her a long, long time, she stopped so often to dream of her new-found happiness, and to thrill anew at the memory of the looks of love and the passionate caresses Norman had given to her, his girlish little love.
“Oh, how good he is to me! I will try to make him very, very happy,” she thought; and in her delirium of love and rapture would have made slow work with her toilet if thoughtful Mrs. de Vere had not sent her maid to help her and come herself at the last to see how it progressed.