“I love you more than a wee bit, Geoffrey,” she answered, in the tone of one who makes a great confession. “I have loved you ever since that night when——”
“When I kissed you under the mistletoe? I remember. I’ve been living on that kiss for four years. I am just aching and hungering for another one. I am going to have it here and now.”
“Geoffrey!” she protested. “In the open street!”
“I don’t care,” he answered with determination. “There is nobody to see except Nature, and Nature keeps her secrets well. Ah”—as he put his desire into execution—“that was beautiful. But tell me, darling, if you really loved me all that time ago, why did you become engaged to another fellow?”
“Because you—you—didn’t——”
“Because I didn’t come forward and claim you?” he suggested, finishing the sentence for her. “But your brother made me promise not to speak: he thought it might hinder your career. He told me he did not approve of mixed marriages either, although he has not practised what he preached. Lady Marjorie is a Christian.”
“Herbert says now that love is more powerful than race and creed,” the girl said softly. “Love breaks all barriers down.”
“Yes, he is right,” her lover rejoined with deepening earnestness. “But there is no barrier of creed ’twixt you and me, now, darling; no barrier of any kind. Did you notice the text of the sermon, to-night, Celia: ‘Neither Jew nor Greek’? Oh, it seemed to me as if the clergyman must have chosen it because he knew we were in the church. ‘Neither Jew nor Greek’ ... united, made one in Christ. No difference between the Jew and the Gentile, for the same God is God of both!”
They had arrived at the hotel, and Herbert Karne was looking out for them in the vestibule. Geoffrey’s buoyant manner and Celia’s happy face told him, before he asked, that their meeting had been a satisfactory one.
Lady Marjorie looked up from her book with a softened expression in her blue eyes, when they made their appearance at the door of the private drawing-room.