"I know my favorite so well, let me hear yours. Read me what you like."
She said it so sweetly, so tenderly that he flushed with pleasure. It was so different from her manner of late that it touched him. He might have been still more impressed if he had been able to read that passionate cry in her heart that kept repeating itself over and over again:
"I will be happy for this one little day—I will be happy."
At first she could scarcely hear the sound of his voice for the cry in her own heart, but gradually it ceased under the soothing influence of his tone, and as if in answer to a prayer for mercy, the awful future was shut out completely, pitifully hidden in the idly passing present.
He turned the leaves of the book for a moment, then came to that sweet old poem that has stirred the heart of every lover of Tennyson with sympathy, "Locksley Hall," and read it as only a man with a voice like his can read. When he came to the last line, he thought she was sleeping, she had grown so quiet, so motionless; but after a moment of silence she stirred slightly and said in a low, dreamy tone:
"Do you believe that—that which you read:
"'Can I think of her as dead, and love her for the love she bore?
No; she never loved me truly. Love is love for evermore?'"
He thought he saw the trend of her thoughts, and answered, softly:
"Who can say? We are so often mistaken in the language of our hearts. How should we know, when we listen to it for the first time, whether the love is that of admiration, of sympathy, of the loneliness of our own souls, of the desire to be loved, or of such love as that to which Tennyson refers? When that love comes, Carlita, the 'love that is love for evermore,' the least comprehensive of us will know, will understand, though we may have erred on former occasions."