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300 face. She stood at Evelyn's side in that quiet and intense happiness which is so rare a feeling in the lot of humanity.

He had told her all,—the arduous enterprise in which he had embarked; he had softened nothing of the dangers which would surround their future and forest home. But she felt that, shared with him, life had no lot that would not bring its blessing; and he, as he gazed into those clear dark eyes which rested on him so confidingly, that if the most entire, the most devoted love could repay the woman that trusted to its protection, that love was his own. Both knew in their inmost soul, that each was the other's happiness. The heart confided in the destiny itself had created.

"I feel too happy," at length exclaimed Francesca, in a voice soft as the moonlight silence which it broke; "And yet 'tis strange how the image of death is uppermost in my thought, as if I desired that the grave should be a security against further change! At this moment I could be content to die."

"Ah, dearest!" replied he, "your spirits are exhausted,—perhaps unconsciously oppressed with the idea of that future whose pain and whose peril I have rather heightened than palliated."