"No," she returned, almost inaudibly.
The odor of the honeysuckle was mingled with the smell of the sea. The old waiter came and departed like a shade. They were alone on the veranda, above the waves over which the rising moon had just thrown a silver net.
But it was a beam of light from the doorway that illuminated the angles of his face, at which she looked with a sensation of faintness. She bent her neck; her hat brim concealed her eyes.
By this time to-morrow!
"Let me hear your voice," he pleaded. "At least I'll fill my mind with those tones; and when I'm alone I can put them together into the words, 'I love you.'"
As if conjured up by this utterance, a breeze swept over them, full of the fragrance of honeysuckle and the acridity of the sea, like the immense, soft breath with which nature blows upon the kindled human heart, fanning it into a sudden conflagration. And the rustling of the vines, together with the murmur of the water, expanded into a sigh which seemed to issue from the multitude of lovers who somewhere—everywhere—at that moment, were swaying toward the irresistible embrace; and from the innumerable flowers of the earth, in the act of relinquishing the sweetness beloved by bees; and, indeed, from that whole spread of mortal consciousness which nature, moved by a supreme necessity, has subjected to this world-wide tyranny.
She lifted her head as if striving to rise above that smothering flood, and in the moonlight her face was revealed to him—her eyes humid, her lips twisted into an unprecedented shape, her whole aspect, in its startling maturity, like that of the immortal goddess whose genius and nature had suddenly possessed this flesh and blood.
Rising, she turned away in a movement of denial that came too late. He followed her to the end of the veranda; and there at last—or, as it seemed to them, again—he took her in his arms. For an instant her averted face imitated the marble nymph's face, her slender and flexible body the nymph's struggling body, before she became limp at his kiss.
In the doorway of the dining room she paused to look back at the veranda. She wanted to remember every arabesque that the vines were tracing in silhouette against the moonlit sea; but she could not see anything distinctly. As she left the restaurant some one presented her with a little bunch of flowers.
It was her wedding bouquet.