‘How perfect it sounds on your lips! I never thought of admiring my name before.’
‘Gilbert Speid,’ repeated she. ‘It is beautiful.’
‘Cecilia Speid is better,’ he whispered.
She disengaged herself gently, and stood looking over the water. The shadow lay across it and halfway up the opposite bank. He watched her.
‘I have lived more than thirty years without you,’ he said. ‘I cannot wait long.’
She made no reply.
‘We must speak to my aunt,’ she said, after a pause. ‘We cannot tell what she may think. At least, I shall not be going far from her.’
‘I cannot offer you what many others might,’ said he, coming closer. ‘I am not a rich man. But, thank God, I can give you everything you have had at Morphie. Nothing is good enough for you, Cecilia; but you shall come first in everything. You know that.’
‘If you were a beggar, I would marry you,’ she said.
Honesty, in those days, was not supposed to be a lady’s accomplishment, but, to Cecilia, this moment, the most sacred she had ever known, was not one for concealment of what lay in the very depths of truth. She had been unconscious of it at the time, but she now knew that that first moment at the dovecot had sealed the fate of her heart. Looking back, she wondered why she had not understood.