“Myra, little Myra, do you care like that?” he cried.  “Then let the friendship go, and be my dear little sweetheart, won’t you?  I’m dying of loneliness and the want of somebody to love and to love me—­somebody who understands me—­and you do, don’t you, Myra, darling?”

She was too happy to answer, but she suffered him to put his arms around her and kiss her soft pale hair—­and her brow—­and her tremulous mouth—­the first kisses of love to him as well as to her.  And ah, how sweet!

He laughed happily, lifted out of his gloom by this new, this deliriously sweet dream.

“Do you know, little sweetheart,” he said, in a voice that was bubbling with joy, “I feel that you have cast those devils out of me forever.  It was you that I wanted all the time, and did not know it.  Some of these days, when I’ve been through college and settled down, we will be married, and wherever our home is, we must always have a porch like this, with a rose on it, and” (kissing her brow) “you must always wear a jessamine in your hair.”

And so the boy-poet and his girl play-mate, very much to their own surprise, parted affianced lovers, and a long vista of sunlit days seemed to beckon The Dreamer.

CHAPTER X.

The session at the University did not begin until the middle of February, so love’s young dream was not to be interrupted too soon.  Meantime, its sweetness was only enhanced by thought of the coming separation.  The affair had too, the interest of secrecy, for the youthful lovers well knew the storm of opposition that would be raised, in both their homes, if it should be discovered.  This need of secrecy made frequent meetings and exchange of vows impossible, but it gave to such as occurred the flavor of stolen sweets and kept the young sinners in a tantalized state which was excruciating and at the same time delightful, and which still further fed the flames and convinced them of the realness and intensity of their passion.

When they did meet, their awed, joyous confessions of mutual love charmed the lonely, romantic boy by their very novelty.  In them his fairest dreams were fulfilled.  How sweet it was in these rare, stolen moments, to crush the pure young creature, who would be his own some day, against his wildly beating heart—­how passing sweet to hear against his ear her whispered, hesitating vows of deep, everlasting love!

In his pretty new room overlooking the terraced garden of the stately mansion which had become his home, Edgar Poe plunged headlong into Byron, and in the mood thus induced, penned many a verse, no worse and not much better than the rhymes of lovelorn youths the world over and time out of mind, to be copied into Myra’s album.

Between the love-making and preparation for college, time took wings.  In what seemed an incredibly short space summer and fall were gone, Christmas, with its festivities, was over and the new year—­the year 1826—­had opened.