"Mine? Mine?" cried the young man, half bewildered. "How mine, and when?"
"Thus," she replied, casting herself upon his breast, and winding her arms around his neck, and kissing his lips passionately and often. "Thus, Raoul, thus, and now!"
He returned her embrace fondly once, but the next instant he removed her almost forcibly from his breast, and held her at arm's length.
"No, no!" he exclaimed, "not thus, not thus! If at all, honestly, openly, holily, in the face of day! May my soul perish, ere cause come through me why you should ever blush to show your front aloft among the purest and the proudest. No, no, not thus, my own Melanie!"
The girl burst into a paroxysm of tears and sobbing, through which she hardly could contrive to make her interrupted and faultering words audible.
"If not now," she said at length, "it will never be. For, hear me, Raoul, and pity me, to-morrow they are about to drag me to Paris."
The lover mused for several moments very deeply, and then replied, "Listen to me, Melanie. If you are in earnest, if you are true, and can be firm, there may yet be happiness in store for us, and that very shortly."
"Do you doubt me, Raoul?"
"I do not doubt you, Melanie. But ever as in my own wildest rapture, even to gain my own extremest bliss, I would not do aught that could possibly cast one shadow on your pure renown, so, mark me, would I not take you to my heart were there one spot, though it were but as a speck in the all-glorious sun, upon the brightness of your purity."
"I believe you, Raoul. I feel, I know that my honor, that my purity is all in all to you.