After a moment's silence, he resumed: “And now, Ginevra, I implore you to delay no longer the reply I have come to receive.”
The recollections of the past had made me forget for a few moments the present; but these words recalled it, and I looked at him as if confounded. There was a moment's silence. My heart beat loudly. At length I silently took from my belt the little sprig of jasmine he had just spoken of, and gave it to him.
He understood the reply, and his eyes lit up with gratitude and joy. I felt happier than I had anticipated. Was not this, in fact, what I had dreamed of, what I had longed for—to be loved? And would it not be easy to love in return such a man as this?
As these thoughts were crossing my mind, and I lowered my eyes before his, he suddenly said:
“Do you know how beautiful you are, Ginevra?”
At these words I frowned, and a blush rose to my forehead which once might have been caused by gratified vanity, but now was only occasioned by sincere, heart-felt displeasure. “Never speak to me of my face, I beg of you,” I said to him, “unless you wish to annoy or displease me.”
He looked at me with the greatest astonishment, though he felt no doubt as to my perfect sincerity, and, taking my hand in his, said:
“You are a being apart, Ginevra, and resemble no one else in any respect. It will be difficult sometimes to obey your request, but I will do so.”
Had I been able to read Lorenzo's heart, I should, in my turn, have been astonished, and perhaps frightened, at the motives that had [pg 461] induced him to link so suddenly his life with mine.
The beauty of which I was no longer vain; the talents I possessed without being aware of it; the strangeness of finding me in a kind of captivity, and the somewhat romantic satisfaction of delivering me from it and changing my condition by a stroke of a wand—such were the elements of the attraction to which he yielded; and if it had occurred to any one to remind him that the girl who was about to become his wife had a soul, he would very probably have replied by a glance of surprise, a sarcastic smile, or a slight shrug of his shoulders, as if to say: “Perhaps so, but it does not concern me.”