Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/109

98 in our creed, I will take you to my temple—a temple not made with hands!"

She smiled on him as she spoke, and a dizzy sweetness filled his life. He did not ask if she had forgotten her words of the past night—he did not ask whether in this lull of dreamy joy and passionate hope there might be but a keener deadliness of disappointment. He was with her; that sufficed. She went with him out into the brightness of the day, down the rocky paths, under shining walls of glossy ilex-leaves and drooping orange clusters of scented blossom. In the fair wild beauty of Capri,—the tranquillity unbroken except by the lapping of the waves far down below and the distant echo of some sea-song, the sunlight that flooded land and water, the shadows sleeping lazily here and there where the lemon and citron boughs were netted into closest luxuriance,—the world seemed formed for love alone.

Since she had bidden his passion die in silence, why did she let him linger here?

He did not ask; he only gave himself to the magic of the present hour, to the sound of her voice as it thrilled in his ear, to the touch of her hair as he lifted from it some low hanging orange branch, to the sorcery of her presence.