“Do you?” he asked.

She was silent for a moment.  “I do love you,” she said in her quiet, intense way.  “I do not talk—­you know that—­but if I could make you happy by dying for you I would.  I love you—­oh, I cannot say how much!  I seem to love God and all the saints, the sun and the flowers, Spain, our Holy Mother and mamma in you.  You are life to me.  I seem to have loved you all my life under another name.  When you are with me I have no more pain or fear left.  You are myself—­more than myself to me.”

“My darling! and you to me!” cried Edgar.

But his voice, though sweet and tender, had not the passionate ring of hers, and his face, though full of the man’s bolder love, had not the intensity which made her so beautiful, so sublime.  It was all the difference between the experience which knew the whole thing by heart, and which cared for itself more than for the beloved, and the wholeness, the ecstasy, of the first and only love born of a nature single, simple and concentrated.

Adelaide, watching and listening behind the broken wall, saw and heard it all.  Her head was on fire, her heart had sunk like lead; she could not stay any longer assisting thus at the ruin of her life’s great hope; she had already stayed too long.  As she stole noiselessly away, her white dress passing a distant opening looked ghastly, seen through the rising mist which the young moon faintly silvered,

“What is that?” cried Leam, a look of terror on her pale face as she rapidly crossed herself.  “It is the Evil Sign.”

“No,” laughed Edgar, profiting by the moment to take her in his arms, judging that if she was frightened she would be willing to feel sheltered.  “It is only one of the ladies passing to go down.  Perhaps it is Adelaide Birkett:  I think it was.”

“And that would be an evil sign in itself,” said Leam, still shuddering.  And yet how safe she felt with his arms about her like this!

“Poor dear Addy! why should she be an ill omen to you, you dear little fluttering, frightened dove?”

“She hates me—­always has, so long as I can remember her,” answered Leam.  “And you are her friend,” she added.

“Her friend, yes, but not her lover, as I am yours—­not her future husband,” said Edgar.

Leam’s hand touched his softly, with a touch that was as fleeting and subtle as her smile.

“A friend is not a wife, you know,” he continued.  “And you are to be my wife, my own dear and beloved little wife—­always with me, never parted again.”

“Never parted again!  Ah, I shall never be unhappy then,” she murmured.

A flash of summer lightning broke through the pale faint moonlight and lighted up the old gray towers with a lurid glow.

Leam was not usually frightened at lightning, but now, perhaps because her whole being was overwrought and strung, she started and crouched down with a sense of awe strangely unlike her usual self.