“My love,” she said, half asleep, “are you not sleepy? Do you know it’s very late?”
He still remained with his brow on his hands, not answering. This troubled her a little, the good little soul, and she put her pretty head out of the hammock, like a bird’s out of its nest, and looked at him with parted lips, not daring to speak again.
At last he said to her:
“Ah! my dear Laura, as we draw nearer to America, I cannot help growing sadder. I don’t know why, but it seems to me that the happiest time of our life will have been that of the voyage.”
“I think so too,” she said; “I should like never to get there.”
He looked at her, clasping his hands with a rapture which you cannot imagine.
“And yet, my angel, you always weep as you pray to God,” he said; “that grieves me very much, for I know well of what people you are thinking, and I believe that you regret what you have done.”
“I, regret it!” she said, looking very hurt; “I, regret having followed you, my beloved! Do you think that, because I have belonged to you such a little while, I love you the less? Is one not a woman, does not one know one’s duty, at seventeen? Did not my mother and sisters say that it was my duty to follow you to Guiana? Did they not say that in that I was doing nothing surprising? I am only surprised that it should have touched you, my love; it is all natural. And now I don’t know how you can think that I regret anything, when I am with you to help you to live, or to die with you if you die!”
She said all that in a voice so soft that you would have thought it was music. I was quite touched by it, and said:
“You’re a good little woman, you are!”