The black eyes and the blue ones met for an instant, Cecil’s full of
passion, Molly’s full of incredulous amazement, but her lover did not
wait for her to utter a protest, he caught her little hands in both his
own--and said eagerly:
“Louise, darling, I owe you an apology for the unjust words I said
to you that day at Ferndale. They were not true, for I love you as I
hinted to you then, and it was pique at your rejoinder that made me
blurt out those untruthful words. Will you forgive me, and let me love
you?”
He had never spoken such words to any woman before, but carried away by
the strength of his newly discovered passion, they rushed from his lips
eloquent with the heart’s emotion. He had a right to expect a serious
reply, but to his horror, mortification, and distress, Molly blurted
out a curt:
“Nonsense!”
Her elegant lover gave a gasp as if some one had thrown cold water
over him, and a momentary anger struggled with the delicious emotion
of love. He lifted his violet eyes to her face full of reproachful
tenderness.
“Louise!” he exclaimed.
She hung her pretty head in bashful confusion.
“You did not mean it!” she muttered, deprecatingly.
“I did mean it. I do mean it. Do not coquette with me, Louise, when I
am so much in earnest. You said just now you never had a lover. You
have one now--will you reject him, or will you accept the heart he
offers? Will you be my wife, little one?”
He felt her trembling as he held her hands tightly in his, and dropping
one, he placed his hand beneath her chin and lifted her face so that
he might look into her eyes. To his surprise and joy they drooped
bashfully, and the warm color rose over her face.
“Louise, what are you going to say to me in return for my confession?
Won’t you love me a little in return? Won’t you give me some hope?”
Was this Cecil Laurens, the cold, the proud, the dignified, pleading to
the girl he had disapproved of, the girl he had called such a baby? She
looked at him in wonder and consternation.
“Oh, what have I done?” she cried out in dismay.
“You have bewitched me, I think,” her lover replied with his rarely
beautiful smile.
“Mr. Laurens, do you really mean it? I--I believed you disliked me,
hated me,” she breathed in a low, half-tender tone, very different from
her usual mocking one.
“I mean it all, Louise. I love you passionately, and I have suffered
torments in the last three weeks from pique and jealousy that I mistook
for anger. Now, my dear, I have been very frank with you. Will you be
as candid in return?” asked Cecil Laurens in a low, winning tone, and
with a glorious smile. Certainly although he had learned his love so
suddenly, he knew how to play the lover well.
She trembled and drew back from him as he leaned toward her. All the
sweet vivid color faded from her face, and her dark eyes sought the
ground.
“I believe you now, Mr. Laurens, although at first I thought you
were jesting,” she said, and her voice was distinctly tremulous.
“I--I--yes, I will be candid with you. I am--am--sorry--you--care for
me--for--it--is--useless, hopeless!”
“Hopeless, Louise? Are you sure?” he asked. “If you have no other
lover, let me try to win you. Your heart is free?”
“No, no, for I love some one else,” she said, desperately.
He was very clever, this Cecil Laurens, and at that moment he read the
heart of the simple girl as he had read his own as by a flash of light.
Smilingly, and with a man’s masterful air, he returned:
“It is my turn now to cry out nonsense, my darling, for I do not
believe that my love is hopeless. I saw in your sweet, shy eyes just
now a tenderness that belonged not to ‘some one else,’ but to me. Look
up, Louise, and own that in these weeks while we seemed to be playing
at cross purposes we were falling headlong into love!”
She tried to deny it, but the usually pert little tongue faltered under
his quizzical and tender gaze.
“Let me alone!” she began frantically, but Cecil Laurens’ arms had
slipped around her waist and he smothered the remonstrating words on
her lips with a long, sweet, lingering, lover’s kiss--one that seemed
to draw the girl’s pure soul from her body and merge it into his.
Faint with the sweetness of this exquisite emotion, Molly rested
passive in his clasp for a moment, then drawing back from him, sighed
bitterly.
“Oh, this is dreadful! Why did I ever come to Ferndale?” she exclaimed
to herself, while Cecil Laurens’ eyes glowed upon her full of
passionate love. Under their warmth, the girl hung her head bashfully,
all her usual effrontery conquered by the thrilling consciousness of
her love and the bitter pain she suffered in her secret knowledge of
its folly.
“Ah, if he but _knew_!” she thought with an inward shudder, and looking
up at him with eyes full of pain, she said:
“I did not try to make you love me, you must always remember that!”
He laughed as he answered:
“No, you did not court my love, dear, certainly. I never saw a rose so
full of thorns as this one that I have won.”
“You have not won me!” she cried with a frightened start, but the
triumphant lover, sure of his prize, replied:
“I do not think you will deny that your heart is mine, Louise, although
I no more tried to win your love than you did mine. But this being so,
the fact remains we were mutually strongly attracted to each other, so
we must charge our union to the score of fate.”
“A strange fate!” Molly muttered, but her lover, who saw nothing
but perfection now, where a short while ago he found so much fault,
answered fondly:
“A very beneficent fate. Only think, we shall not only make ourselves
happy by our marriage, but we shall please our families, who have been
neighbors and intimates almost a century.”
“I have not said I would marry you, Mr. Laurens!” she cried out,
quickly, more and more frightened, but he only smiled at what seemed
to him maidenly bashfulness.
“Marriage naturally follows love like ours, dear,” he said, tenderly.
“And, Louise, darling, I shall make you a very good husband. You will
not find me such a bear as I have been these past weeks, when your
coldness hurt my unconscious love and stung me to anger. You will be
different, too, my pet, for our love will change our thoughts and our
lives.”
“Yes,” she murmured, faintly, for she knew far better than he the
extent of that change, but just now she did not contradict him again.
“What is the use? He will not listen,” she thought, feverishly. “I will
let him love me while he is here and when he is gone I will write him
very positively that I can not marry him.”
Her love and his happy masterful air made a coward of her, and she was
willing to put off the fatal declaration, feeling a guilty pleasure in
basking in this sunshine to which she had no right, and from which she
must soon steal away into the gloom of a life made sad by an unhappy
love.
For deep down in her heart Molly Trueheart knew already that this
mutual love between her and Cecil Laurens was a catastrophe, not a
blessing, as he believed it. She knew that she could never marry him,
but her feeble declarations to that effect had been silenced by his
objections, so she decided to filch from fate a few bitter-sweet hours
before she parted forever from this splendid yet forbidden love.
Afterward, when the storm-rains of despair beat on her defenseless
head, and her heart ached on amid fiercest tortures, Molly looked
back on this hour, the beginning of it all, with a great wonder at her
weakness and cowardice. Why had she yielded even for an hour to this
madness? Why had she let her love make her a craven and a coward?
She laid all the blame upon herself in wonder and sorrow and
repentance, too ignorant and unversed in the mysteries of life and
nature to comprehend that it was not so much her honesty that had been
at fault as that through her love her will-power had been dominated
by the magnetic force of her lover. For grand, handsome, noble Cecil
Laurens, although unconscious of his power, was possessed of a strong
magnetism that subtly influenced all with whom he came in contact,
and doubly attracted the susceptible girl whom he loved. She did not
realize the power of this magnetic will any more than Cecil himself
did, yet certainly it was more than half to blame for poor Molly
Trueheart’s treachery.