“Yes,” she said.  “I know now.  I know that I am giving you myself, that I am placing all my life in your hands.”

“God help me to guard it and make it happy!” he said; then he laughed.  “I have no fear!  I will make you happy, Ida!  I—­I feel that I shall.  Do you understand what I mean?  I feel as if I had been set apart, chosen from all the millions of men, to love you and cherish you and make you happy!  And you, Ida?”

She looked up at him with the same far-away, dreamy expression in her wonderful eyes.

“Now at this moment I felt that I, too, have been set apart for you:  is it because you have just said the same?  No, because I felt it when you kissed me just now.  Ah, I am glad you did it!  If you had not I might not have known that I loved you, I might have let you go forever, thinking that I did not care.  It was your kiss that opened my heart to me and showed me—.”

He bent over her until his lips nearly touched hers.  “Kiss me in return—­of your own accord, Ida!  But once, if you will; but kiss me!”

Without a blush, solemnly as if it were a sacrament, she raised her head and kissed him on the lips.

There fell a silence.  The world around them, in the soft shimmer of the crescent moon, became an enchanted region, the land that never was on earth or sea, the land of love, in which all that dwell therein move in the glamour of the sacred Fire of Love.

Stafford broke it at last.  It is the man who cannot be contented with silence; he thirsts for his mistress’s voice.

“Dearest, what shall I do?  You must tell me,” he said, as if he had been thinking.  “I will do whatever you wish, whatever you think best.  I’ve a strong suspicion that you’re the cleverest of us; that you’ve got more brains in this sweet little finger of yours than I’ve got in my clumsy head—­”

She laughed softly and looked at the head which he had libelled, the shapely head with its close-cut hair, which, sliding her hand up, she touched caressingly.

“Shall I come to your father to-morrow, Ida?  I will ride over after breakfast—­before, if you like:  if I had my way I’d patrol up and down here all night until it was a decent time to call upon him.”

She nestled a little closer to him, and her brows came level with sudden gravity and doubt.

“My father!  I had not thought of him—­of what he would say—­do.  But I know!  He—­he will be very angry,” she said, in a low voice.

“Will he?  Why?” Stafford asked.  “Of course I know I’m not worthy of you, Ida; no living man is!”

“Not worthy!”

She smiled at him with the woman’s worship already dawning in her deep grey eyes.

“It is I who am not worthy.  Why, think!  I am only an inexperienced girl—­living the life of a farmer’s daughter.  We are very poor—­oh, you do not know how poor!  We are almost as poor as the smallest tenant, though we live in this big house, and are still regarded as great people—­the Herons of Herondale.”