The surprised look upon his face intensified until it became perfectly blank. “Husbands are not lovers? Child, who put such notions into your head? As husband and wife, when we are such, then will be the time of the perfect blending of our love—you mine and I thine. Imelda, now that I know the sweet boon of your love is mine, I want to realize it in its fullness. You must grant me the consummation of it.”
Again she was folded in his arms, pillowed upon his breast, while his cheek rested against hers. She felt the increase of his passion in the kisses he pressed upon her lips. His breath mingled with hers. She felt and heard the mighty throbs of his heart, while his love for her seemed almost to overpower him. She felt her blood in a feverish glow as it pulsed through her veins; it was heaven, but—a shudder suddenly shook her frame, she whispered, hurriedly, intensely: “No! No! No! I can not, can not marry you. I am afraid!”
With a mighty effort conquering the tumult of his emotions, but still holding her closely pressed, he could only articulate, “But why? Why should you be afraid when I love you, oh, so dearly? I want you for my own, my precious one—my very own, where never the breath of another man can touch you; where you will be mine forever more.”
“And when the time comes that this feverish love-fire of yours shall have burned itself out, when you begin to tire of me,—always me—what then will I do with my intense love nature? a nature to which love is life and without which I cannot live. What then, Norman, will become of me?” She lay back in his arms and again holding his face between her hands she asked the question with a fierce intensity that left her voice a mere husky whisper,—“Norman, Norman, what then will become of me?”
Norman Carlton was more than surprised; he was fast becoming puzzled. There was every evidence that the girl he was holding in his arms bore him a deep-rooted love, but that she should, at the outset,—at the very moment of the meeting and blending of these two intense natures, that at such a time there should arise in her heart a fear of the future,—fear that a time might come when his love for her might not be the same, did not at all accord with the knowledge he, until now, possessed of the feminine nature.
Woman, as he had found her, was only too willing to believe all the love rhapsodies of man. If he but offered her marriage he was always held by the gentler sex to be the soul of honor. And really, thought he, what greater honor could man confer upon woman than marriage? To make her his wife, to give her his name! Yet here was a woman who with the intensity of a perfectly healthy and normal endowment, bore him a love which only such an one could give, and yet—and yet withheld the trust that he, until now, had found inseparable from the love of woman.
She seemed to be possessed of a doubt that his love would be a lasting one, in the face of the fact of his having just made her an offer of marriage,—using the argument, against all his passionate wooing, that love would not last. He had heard, but had read little, of the doctrines that were at this time being agitated in society, of marriage being a failure; that there was no true happiness in domestic life, etc., etc. Could it be possible that this girl, who had wound herself with the most tender coils about his heart, had imbibed such heresies? He hoped not! The love he bore her was a pure love, and a pure love only he must have in return, and could a love that he had heard termed “free love,”—such as he understood the term, be a pure one? She loved, and yet refused marriage. She clung to the lover and repelled the idea of a husband. What could it mean! It was beyond Norman Carlton’s conception of pure womanhood.
He was indeed the soul of honor. He held all womankind in high esteem. He revered his mother, and held his sister as one to look up to. His highest conception of happiness was the mutual love of the sexes, the consummation of which meant marriage. His idea of home, and of home life was something exalted, while his ideal of a wife was a thing to be held apart from all the world. She should be his to care for, to make smooth the rough paths of her life, to protect and guard her. She should be the mother of his children. He felt, he knew his love would be as lasting as the hills. Why then should she fear? With conflicting emotions he gently clasped her hands while he sought to read what was hidden within the depths of those brown wells of light.
Gently, softly, he spoke: “Why should my girl doubt the strength, the durability, of my love? Does not intuition tell her it will be safe to trust me?”
“Aye, I do trust you, Norman. I would willingly place my hand in yours and follow you to the end of the world. With your love to lean on I would wander with you to some isolated spot where there was no one else to see the whole year round, and be happy, O, so happy, and yet——”