Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/217

Rh the door-way curtains, A deep-shaded candle on the reading-table by the bedside threw a light over the lower part of her face, and on one out-stretched arm in its long white-worked frill, and on the hand with up-held fingers on the white rounded edge of the bed. All the rest was shadowed.

'Well?' I said, smiling, and standing for a moment with the curtains in my backward hands.

She smiled back to me. I crossed over to her, and sat down beside the outstretched arm of the long white-worked frill and the hand of the upheld fingers on the rounded edge of the bed. And I took the hand of the upheld fingers, while her two eyes looked quietly in mine; and bent, and softly kissed her two soft red lips; and she murmured:

'You see, I hadn't to chase you for it, after all!'

'No,' I answered, 'I cheerfully do what the dilly-ducks would not do: I come to be killed. Death's too sweet to be fearful.'

' What do you mean?'

I kissed her, again, smiling:

'That I love you.'

' Then I hope you will always mean that; for I love you—oh, I do love you,—ever so much!'

'More than you love yourself?'

'I don't think I have any self left to love. It's all yours!'

Then, in loving myself, I shall but be loving you?'

'Yes!' 'Love must be unselfish, then, whether it like it or no. For, in loving itself, it only succeeds in loving somebody else Do you understand it all?'

And seeing she did not, all of it, I once more bent again, and once more kissed her two soft red lips; and she once more murmured, laughing low:

'I understand that part! But—I seem to think you might do it over a-gain!'

 

divided the day off in this way: My books from ten to one; then lunch; then generally somewhere