Her voice was stifled with a little rush of tears. Where she lay on his breast, he felt how all her frame quivered.
“And you will be mine, dear Zillah—and soon?” His eyes burned into hers, asking for an answer as loudly as his lips.
She did not answer him for a moment. Her heart beat with a tumultuous gladness, and her brain throbbed with the wonder of what she conceived to be the honour that had come to her. Wondering incredulity mingled with the rapturous ecstasy that filled her.
“But you are so great—so——” She paused, she could find no words to express all that prospective wifedom to him appeared to her.
He smiled down into her eyes. Her loveliness seemed to him greater than ever before.
“You seem like a king to me!” she gasped at last.
“You, Zillah,” he smiled, “do not seem, you are, a queen to me. Say, darling, the one word that shall fill all my soul with delight—say that you will be mine—and soon, very soon!”
“I will.”
There was the intensity of a mighty love in her utterance of the two words.
He gathered her to himself in an even closer embrace, and spent his kisses on her lips.