There came a time when I trembled before him.  I could no longer walk calmly arm-in-arm with him under the linden-trees, hearkening joyfully.  I dared not lift my eyes to his face; I turned pale with suppressed feeling, if he but spoke my name—­Juanita—­or took my hand in his for friendly greeting.  What a hand it was!—­so white, and soft, and shapely, yet so powerful!  It was the right hand for him,—­a fair and delicate seeming, a cruel, hidden strength.  When he spoke of the future my heart cried out against it; it was intolerable to me.  In its bright triumphs I could have no part; thereto I could follow him only with my love and tears.  The present alone was mine, and to that I passionately clung.  For I never dreamed, you see, that he could love me.

My manner toward him changed; I was fitful and capricious.  I dreaded, above all things, that he should suspect my feelings.  Sometimes I met him coldly; sometimes I received his confidences with an indifferent and weary air.  This could not last.

One night—­it was a little time before he left us—­he begged me to walk with him once more under the lindens.  I made many excuses, but he overruled them all.  We left the brilliantly-lighted rooms and stood beneath the solemn shadow of the trees.  It was a warm, soft night; the harvest moon shone down upon us; a south wind moaned among the branches.  We walked silently on till we reached a rustic seat, formed of gnarled boughs fantastically bound together; here he made me sit down and placed himself beside me.

“Juanita,” he said, in a tone so soft, so thrillingly musical, that I shall never forget it, “what has come between us?  Are you no longer my friend?”

I tried to answer him, and could not; love and grief choked my utterance.

“Look at me,” he said.

I looked.  The moon shone full on his face; his eyes were bent on mine.  What a serpent-charm lurked in their treacherous blue depths!  If, looking at me thus, he had bidden me kill myself at his feet, I must have done it.

“Juanita,” he said, with a smile of conscious power, “you love me!  But why should that destroy our happiness?”

He held out his arms; I threw myself on his bosom in an agony of shame and joy.  Oh, Heaven! could it be possible that he loved me at last?

Long, long, we sat there in the moonlight, his arms around me, my hand clasped in his.  Poor hand! even by that faint radiance how dark and thin it looked beside his, so white and rounded!  How gloriously beautiful was he! what a poor, pale shadow I!  And yet he loved me!  He did not talk much of it; he spoke more of the future,—­our future.  It all lay before him, a bright, enchanted land, wherein we two should walk together.  We had not quite reached it, but we surely should, and that ere long.