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Page 20
Never has she appeared so spiritual, so true and tender; so full of
sweetness that is almost unearthly. All pride seems gone from her, and
in its place only a gentle melancholy reigns; she looks so far removed
from him, sitting there in the purity of her white robes, that, at
first, he hesitates to address her. To his excited imagination, she
is like an angel resting on its way to the realms above.
At last, however, his heart compelling him, he speaks aloud.
"Florence, you still awake, when all the world is sleeping?"
Her name falling from his lips touches a chord in her breast, and wakes
her to passionate life.
"You too," she says in a whisper that reaches his strained ears. There
seems to her a subtle joy in the thought that they two of all the
household are awake, are here talking together alone in the pale light
of the moon.
Yet she is wrong in imagining that no others are up in the house, as his
next words tell her.
"It is not a matter of wonder in my case," he responds; "a few fellows
are still in the smoking-room. It is early, you know--not yet three. But
you--why are you keeping a lonely vigil like this?"
"The moon tempted me to the window," answers Florence. "See how calm
she looks riding majestically up there. See"--stretching out her bare
white arm until the beams fall full upon it, and seem to change it to
purest marble--"does it not make one feel as if all the world were being
bathed in its subdued glow?"
A pale tremulous smile widens her lips. Sir Adrian, plucking a tall pale
lily growing near him, flings it upward with such an eager aim that it
alights upon her window-sill. She sees it. Her fingers close upon it.
"Fit emblem of its possessor," says Adrian softly, and rather
unsteadily. "Do you know of what you remind me, sitting there in your
white robes? A medieval saint cut in stone--a pure angel, too good, too
far above all earthly passion to enter into it, or understand it, and
the grief that must ever attend upon it."
He speaks bitterly. It seems to him that she is indeed cold not to
have guessed before this the intensity of his love for her. However
much she may have given her affection to another, it still seems to him
inexpressibly hard that she can have no pity for his suffering. He gazes
at her intently. Do the mystic moonbeams deceive him, or are there tears
in her great dark eyes? His heart beats quickly. Once again he remembers
her emotion of the past evening. He hears again her passionate sobs. Is
she unhappy? Are there thorns in her path that are difficult to remove?
"Florence, once again I entreat you to confide in me," he says, after a
pause.
"I can not," she returns, sadly but firmly. "But there is one thing I
must say to you--think of me as you may for saying it--I am not cold as
you seemed to imply a moment since; I am not made of stone; and, alas,
the grief you think me incapable of understanding is mine already! You
have wronged me in your thoughts. I have here," she exclaims with some
vehemence, laying the hand in which she still holds the drooping lily
upon her breast, "what I would gladly be without--a heart."
"Nay," says Adrian hastily; "you forget. It is no longer yours, you have
given it away."
For an instant she glances at him keenly, while her breath comes and
goes with painful quickness.
"You have no right to say so," she murmurs at last.
"No, of course not; I beg your pardon," he says apologetically. "It is
your own secret."
"There is no secret," she declares nervously. "None."
"I have offended you. I should not have said that. You will forgive me?"
he entreats, with agitation.
"You are quite forgiven;" and, as a token of the truth of her words, she
leans a little further out of the window, and looks down at him with a
face pale indeed, but full of an unutterable sweetness.
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