"I love you," he repeated--"how deeply no words of mine can tell! The months that have separated us have been to me a torture. I cannot rest apart from you. I have come from England expressly to see you. I am here now to ask you to be mine. I had intended to stay long with, or near you, and seek to win my way gradually into your heart, but I can be silent no longer. Who can forge chains for love, and say, 'To-day thou shalt be dumb; to-morrow thou shalt speak?' Forgive me if my language seems wild. We Italians do not love so coldly as your English youth; we are all passion and flame. If I am precipitate, if I am rash, if I am mad, blame not me, but blame the beauty that has made me so."
He checked the flow of his words; they seem poor and commonplace enough on paper. It must have been the tone in which they were uttered, and the aid they received from his sparkling eyes and dramatic gestures, that made them sound like eloquence at the time.
Daphne, her drooping eyes fixed on the ground, stood beside the tree overhanging the fountain, still and silent as a statue. To say "No" to any request, however trifling, was always a source of pain to her; how much more now when it would give despair to the one it was addressed to!
"Ah, Heaven! how beautiful you are! What a picture you would make!" One might have thought from the manner in which he dwelt on the word "picture" that he wanted her for no other purpose than to minister to his art. "Will you not speak, Daphne?"
"Give me time--a day--to reflect. I will reply to you by--by letter."
"No, no--a thousand times, no! Not for worlds will I endure another such night as last in an agony of suspense and doubt. Let me have your answer here and now. This avowal cannot be a surprise to you. What woman was ever loved without knowing it? Did you not understand my action yesterday when I knelt before your picture? Could you not interpret the look in my eyes the first time they saw your face? That day marked an era in my art. For years I had been seeking to paint a face that should be the very ideal of beauty, and my hand had failed to delineate the shadowy conceptions of my mind; but at last the ideal face shone upon me. My dream of beauty was realised in a living form. With that bright form by my side to inspire my pencil----"
