“You are come at last!” he cried, happily. “I have been hoping and watching for you more than an hour! I should have been in a fever of impatience if you had stayed away much longer!”
“And yet it is quite early. See, the dew is not yet dry on the roses I brought you,” smiled Leola, as she drew a chair close to his side.
“Are you not glad I escaped with so slight injury?” he exclaimed, joyously. “And only to think that I owe my life to you! How can I repay you but by devoting it to your service?”
This was very rapid love-making, indeed. Leola, with her very limited experience that way, felt it was so, yet somehow she could not chide him. Her heart beat very fast, her cheeks flamed crimson, and when she tried to look away from him she could not help his gaze from holding hers in a long look into her soul that was trying to hide from him beneath her dark, curling lashes. In that moment of pure rapture Sir Cupid transfixed both their hearts with his cunning arrow. They were no more strangers; they seemed to have known each other in some past incarnation.
Leola thought, thrillingly:
“Surely this is love that makes my heart beat so fast and my cheeks burn under his glance, that holds my own so that I cannot look away! He is my fate!”
The young stranger was saying to himself, quite as romantically:
“Before I saw this exquisite creature I was madly in love with her shadow, and now that we have met, my heart is in her keeping forever. I owe her my very life, and I will be her true knight—and swear eternal fealty to my liege lady!”
He reached out and caught her hand, saying, deeply and tenderly:
“Forgive me if I seem too hasty, but something urges me on to confess my love before some unknown fate comes between us. Leola, am I too hasty, or may I hope to win your heart?”