"If you——" he repeated softly. "Oh—say the rest, or if you would rather not—I will say it for you. You mean, if you could make up your mind to leave all this, leave everything and everyone you have known, and come to me—is that it?"
They were for a moment completely alone, but as Antoine might approach at any instant, laden with boughs of evergreen for decoration purposes, conversation was of a stolen and hurried kind. Ringfield, in whom first love had rapidly modified all natural shyness of the sex, was no lukewarm lover; he took Pauline's hands, and bringing them to his lips, pressed ardent kisses upon them, urging her to at once decide in his favour and give him the right to guard her interests for ever. How or where they would live was no matter, her best impulses must surely move all her heart towards him, and at last he heard from her a soft answer, which was nevertheless a clear affirmative, and now, not only hands but lips joined in this rare moment, and Pauline, no longer estimating the minister as one unlearned in the subtle lists of love, felt happier than she had done for months. She had made, she told herself, the best choice offered her, and for the moment she swore resolutions of holy living and quiet dying, all in the character of Ringfield's wife. As for him, the kiss had sealed all and changed all.
"Now at last I shall live again, be a free agent, able to do my work! You can have no conception of what it has been for me to get up my sermons, for example, or to go about among the people here, thinking of you, wondering if you would ever come to me or not. I have pictured you going back to that other man, and I have hated you for it, hated you both!"
"Oh—hush, hush, be careful!" Miss Clairville, like all women, was now afraid of the passion she had awakened. "Let us get to work—some one may come in—you do not mind helping me now?"
"Not—if you mean what you say! Not—if this time you are telling me the truth!"
"You cannot forget that lapse of mine, it seems. Well, I do mean it, I do, I do! And you—you mean it too? You would take me even with my past, and that past unexplained, with my faults and my temper?"
"I have told you before that I would," he returned firmly. "No matter what has happened; no matter what you have done, what anyone else has done, I would, I will, I do take you! You are Heaven's choicest, dearest gift to me—and what am I but an erring man trying to walk straight and see straight!"
Miss Clairville's eyes sparkled with mischief, while her mouth remained solemn.
"Then you must not talk of hating. Love your enemies, Mr. Ringfield, and bless them that persecute you. That isn't in the Catholic Manual in those words perhaps, but I have seen it somewhere, I think in the Testament Nouveau. You see—— I am always 'good Methodist' as our friend Poussette would say."
"You shall be a better one in the future," exclaimed Ringfield, tenderly, and as at that moment Poussette himself appeared, to lend assistance, the interview was at an end.