‘It will be for me to obey,’ she murmured, with the colour deepening in her cheeks. ‘And I will do it always, so gladly: but would you tell me one thing: did you—I mean—if you had not cared for me a little, surely you would never have wished——?’
She paused, overcome by the sense of her own hardihood, and her eyes filled with tears; she longed to say to him, ‘Instead of all your jewels, instead of all this luxury, give me one fond word,’ but her timidity and her modesty would not let her lips frame the supplication. He was still as a stranger to her—a man whom she had seen scarce a dozen times.
The question in its timid commencement had said enough: his conscience shrank from it; he had always dreaded the moment inevitable of the fatal—
‘If this be love, tell me how much.’
‘Would you tell me?’ she repeated very low, then paused with an overwhelming sense of her own hardihood and great immodesty.
She made a beautiful picture as she stood before him; the cream-hued satin falling about her, the warm cedar-wood panels behind her, the red light of the sunset shed like a glory upon her head and shining about her feet.
‘Who would not love you, dear?’ he murmured, with a hesitation of which her own confusion spared her from being conscious. ‘Never doubt my affection. I have not been as happy as the world thinks me, but if I be not happy beside you, fate will indeed find me thankless.’
Nor was it altogether untrue; she looked infinitely lovely to him in that moment, with the tears shining in her upraised eyes, and the blue veins of her throat swelling where the orange flowers touched them; and all this was his—his as wholly as the budding primrose in the woods is the child’s that finds it and may pluck and rifle it at will.
An emotion that was more nearly passion than he had hitherto felt for her moved him as he looked on her.
With a sudden impulse of the joy and mastery of possession, warmer and more eager than any she had roused in him before, he took her in his arms and kissed her throat where the orange flowers were fastened, and, with a tender touch, unloosed them.