“Now, I am going to leave you two,” said Harrington, rising, and addressing Wentworth and Emily. “Muriel, I feel weary with the excitements of this day, and as I shall want all my freshness and vigor for this adventure, I am going up-stairs to sleep an hour or two. Richard, I’ll see you at the boat.”
“Good,” responded Wentworth. “Au revoir.”
Harrington bent his head smilingly to them both, and putting his arm around Muriel’s waist, drew her with him from the room.
“Sleep will be twice sleep with you near me,” he tenderly murmured, bending his face down to hers, as they went up the stairs together.
“Ah,” she said, with pensive playfulness, “I was afraid you were going to leave me in exile while you slept, and I do not wish to be away from you now.”
He did not answer, but clasped her a little closer to him, and they ascended in silence to their chamber.
She silently lighted a sconce upon the wall, which shed through its ground-glass globe a mellow moony light upon the pure and virginal room, with its furniture of white and gold, and its cloudlike couch, overhung with a drooping fall of filmy gauze. Then going to a closet, she took from thence a slender crystal flask covered with golden arabesques, and brought it to him.
“See,” she said, “My Greek friend, Kestor, made me a present of this more than a year ago. It is Greek wine. Yes—the vine that gave us this grew from the soil of the antique heroes. I have kept it for some great occasion, and to-night before you go, you and I will drink it.”
Smiling, he took the flask from her hand and held it to the light, looking at the clear rosy-golden glow of the fine liquid.
“It is beautiful,” he said. “Too beautiful to drink. One might fancy this such wine as Leonidas and the Three Hundred drank at the last banquet before they sallied from the immortal pass and fell upon the hosts of Xerxes. It looks fit for the veins of heroes.”