"Are you warm enough there?" he asked, and there was an unconscious tenderness in his voice as he asked the question, "or shall I fetch you a wrap?"
She smiled. "I have my hood," she said. "It is the warmest thing I ever wear, except, of course, in winter."
Philip looked at the hood as she drew it more closely over her head, and thought that surely no more becoming article of apparel ever was designed for woman's wear. He had never seen anything like it either in color or texture,--it was of a peculiarly warm, rich crimson, like the heart of a red damask rose, and it suited the bright hair and tender, thoughtful eyes of its owner to perfection.
"Tell me," he said, drawing a little nearer and speaking in a lower tone, "have you forgiven me for my rudeness the first time I saw you?"
She looked a little troubled.
"Perhaps also I was rude," she said gently. "I did not know you. I thought--"
"You were quite right," he eagerly interrupted her. "It was very impertinent of me to ask you for your name. I should have found it out for myself, as I have done."
And he smiled at her as he said the last words with marked emphasis. She raised her eyes wistfully.
"And you are glad?" she asked softly and with a sort of wonder in her accents.
"Glad to know your name? glad to know you! Of course! Can you ask such a question?"
"But why?" persisted Thelma. "It is not as if you were lonely,--you have friends already. We are nothing to you. Soon you will go away, and you will think of the Altenfjord as a dream,--and our names will be forgotten. That is natural!"
What a foolish rush of passion filled his heart as she spoke in those mellow, almost plaintive accents,--what wild words leaped to his lips and what an effort it cost him to keep them hack. The heat and impetuosity of Romeo,--whom up to the present he had been inclined to consider a particularly stupid youth,--was now quite comprehensible to his mind, and he, the cool, self-possessed Englishman, was ready at that moment to outrival Juliet's lover, in his utmost excesses of amorous folly. In spite of his self-restraint, his voice quivered a little as he answered her-"I shall never forget the Altenfjord or you, Miss Güldmar. Don't you know there are some things that cannot be forgotten? such as a sudden glimpse of fine scenery,--a beautiful song, or a pathetic poem?" She bent her head in assent. "And here there is so much to remember--the light of the midnight sun,--the glorious mountains, the loveliness of the whole land!"