“Don't speak like that,” she said with a shiver. “It is horrible to make a woman love. There is no woman made to love that does not repent it in shame and misery.”
“But you once did love me.”
“You have hurt me. Life has hurt me,” she said gently. “I don't mean to say that it was not partly my own fault, nor do I want to pose as an injured woman. But the fact remains, Syl, dear; and you must let time do what it can in the way of healing. If you care for me, see me a little oftener than you have done,—it will be good for both of us,—but don't speak of this again.”
“Am I to go through a term of probation?” he asked.
“Heaven forbid!” said Ella.
There the matter remained. They met more frequently, became fast friends, and Sylvester waited. And so the two years slipped by.
It was a hot August day, and Lady Milmo sat in the verandah of the little hotel at Vitznau at the foot of the Righi, with a novel open on her lap. Her eyes were fixed idly upon a little speck of a boat on the lake by whose sides rose rhythmically tiny silver flashes.
“Why don't you come unexpectedly upon us here?” she had written to Sylvester, of whose arrival in Zermatt a chance-met wandering acquaintance had told her. “You will find the Righi much more satisfactory than that silly Jungfrau. And you will find two people quite disposed to be very kind to you.”
So Sylvester had left his ice-axes and ropes and mountaineering boots at Zermatt, and had flown on the wings of hope to Vitznau, and there he was with Ella in the little boat on the lake.