She was going to be a teacher, she said; she was bending all her energies in that direction, and was working, he felt assured, far beyond her strength.
She did not look fit to fight the battle of life alone; she was slender and delicate, although he felt that, in spite of her fragile appearance, there was an element of strength in her character which would overcome every obstacle which it was possible for a human being in her position to overcome.
She had “her future to carve out,” she had told him. What did she intend that future to be?—what were her hopes, her aims, her plans? Surely not to teach always.
Ah, if she would but learn to love him—if he could win her, it would be very different from the wearying, dragging life of a teacher.
Before he was hardly aware of his intention, his heart had overleaped every barrier, he bent toward her and said, in a low, earnest tone:
“Star, I love you. Let me depict your future for you.”
CHAPTER XV.
A FATAL MISTAKE.
The beautiful maiden cast one startled glance up at her handsome lover, and then grew colorless as the dress she wore.
But when he softly laid his hand upon hers, saying, gently, “Darling, I have frightened you with my abruptness,” her whole being thrilled beneath his touch, and the rich crimson swept swiftly up over neck, face, and brow, until it lost itself in the fluffy masses of sunny hair which lay upon her forehead.
“I could not help it,” he went on, a glad light leaping to his eyes as he saw her blushes; “and I have known that I love you, my beautiful one, for a long time. Do you remember that it was I who received you into my arms when you were lifted to the deck of our steamer from that frail boat in which you so nearly perished? Do you know that your fair face lay upon my breast, and as I looked down upon you, I knew that no other had ever moved me so strangely and so deeply, despite its pallor and the tale of suffering that I read there? Its power grew upon me during the few days which followed and while we were so much together, and when at last we were obliged to part, and I begged a tress of this sunshine”—touching the massive braid which lay over her shoulder almost reverently—“the picture that you made, with your shy grace and modest beauty as you unhesitatingly clipped it for me, stamped itself indelibly upon my heart, where I have carried it ever since, growing to love it more and more, until I determined to make it always mine by putting it on canvas. I did not know as I should ever see you again, and yet I have been haunted by a feeling that some magnetic influence or strange power of attraction would eventually draw us together again; and so it has proved. Star, I know that I love you as deeply and truly as it is possible for one human being to love another. You say you love England; you wish to go back and make your home there. Tell me that, some day, I may take you there—that my home shall become your home, and you will be my cherished wife. My darling, you have made yourself very fair to-day—so like the picture I have painted, and which I showed you yesterday, that something has whispered to me that a thought of me prompted it; that there was something of tenderness in your heart which made you put those shining locks, which you have been wearing in another fashion of late, into this massive braid again, and tie it with this lovely blue, so like your eyes. Raise them, dear, and let me look into them, to see if I can read anything of the story I wish to know. Tell me, Star, that when I come to America again, I may come to claim this hand and call its owner my wife.”