She smiled dreamily as she leaned against his breast and looked up into his eyes.
"I cannot say it properly!" she said. "There is no language for my heart! If I could tell you all I feel, you would think it foolish, I am sure, because it is all so wild and strange,"--she stopped, and her face grew pale,--"oh!" she murmured with a slight tremor; "it is terrible!"
"What is terrible, my sweet one?" asked Errington drawing her more closely, and folding her more tightly in his arms.
She sighed deeply. "To have no more life of my own!" she answered, while her low voice quivered with intense feeling. "It has all gone--to you! And yours has come to me!--is it not strange and almost sad? How your heart beats, poor boy!--I can hear it throb, throb--so fast!--here, where I am resting my head." She looked up, and her little white hand caressed his cheek. "Philip," she said very softly, "what are you thinking about? Your eyes shine so brightly--do you know you have beautiful eyes?"
"Have I?" he murmured abstractedly, looking down on that exquisite, innocent, glowing face, and trembling with the force of the restrained passion that kindled through him. "I don't know about that!--yours seem to me like two stars fallen from heaven! Oh, Thelma, my darling!--God make me worthy of you."
He spoke with intense fervor,--kissing her with a tenderness, in which there was something of reverence as well as fear. The whole soul of the man was startled and roused to inexpressible devotion, by the absolute simplicity and purity of her nature--the direct frankness with which she had said her life was his--his!--and in what way was HE fitted to be the guardian and possessor of this white lily from the garden of God? She was so utterly different to all women as he had known them--as different as a bird of paradise to a common house-sparrow. Meanwhile, as these thoughts flitted through his brain, she moved gently from his embrace and smiled proudly, yet sweetly.
"Worthy of me?" she said softly and wonderingly. "It is I that will pray to be made worthy of you! You must not put it wrongly, Philip!"
He made no answer, but looked at her as she stood before him, majestic as a young empress in her straight, unadorned white gown.
"Thelma!" he said suddenly, "do you know how lovely you are?"