And yet they met
daily. Sometimes Stafford would ride over from Brae Wood and meet her
by the river. There was a hollow there, so deep that it hid not only
themselves but the horses, and here they would sit, hand in hand, or
more often with his arm round her and her small, shapely head with its
soft, but roughened hair, upon his breast. Sometimes he would row
across the lake and they would walk side by side along the bank, and
screened by the trees in which the linnet and the thrush sang the songs
which make a lover's litany; at others--and these were the sweetest
meeting of all, for they came in the soft and stilly night when all
nature was hushed as if under the spell of the one great passion--he
would ride or walk over after dinner, and they would sit in the ruined
archway of the old chapel and talk of their blank past, the magic
present, and the future which was to hold nothing but happiness.
Love grows fast under such conditions, and the love of these two
mortals grew to gigantic proportions, absorbing the lives of both of
them. To Stafford, all the hours that were not spent with this girl of
his heart were so much dreary waste.
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