This is only the second evening I have met you,
and yet I feel as if I had loved you for years. The thought of you and
you alone is now the life of my life.'
He uttered his burning words of love in a low voice, looking straight
before him, and she listened in a similar attitude, apparently quite
impassive, almost stony. Only a sprinkling of people remained in the
gallery. Between the busts of the Caesars along the walls, lamps with
milky globes shaped like lilies shed an even, tempered light. The
profusion of palms and flowering plants gave the whole place the look of
a sumptuous conservatory. The music floated through the warm-scented air
under the vaulted roof and over all this mythology like a breeze though
an enchanted garden.
'Can you love me?' he asked: 'tell me if you think you can ever love
me.'
'I came only for you,' she returned slowly.
'Tell me that you will love me,' he repeated, while every drop of blood
seemed to rush in a tumult of joy to his heart.
'Perhaps----' she answered, and she looked into his face with that same
look which, on the preceding evening, had seemed to hold a divine
promise, that ineffable gaze which acts like the velvet touch of a
loving hand. Neither of them spoke; they listened to the sweet and
fitful strains of the music, now slow and faint as a zephyr, now loud
and rushing like a sudden tempest.
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