It was in one of the last places where he would have thought to meet her unattended--at the Nutcracking Rock, an ancient logan-stone, which rests, as it were, upon a keel, so that a push rolls it from side to side, at each vibration being arrested by a stone, against which it knocks. Hence its name, and it stands in a wooded and solitary place, near the shore of the bay, covered with golden moss and surrounded by dwarf oak-trees and hawthorns.
She was seated on a camp-stool, and so intent on her work of sketching it, that he drew near her unperceived, with his heart beating almost painfully, and every fibre tingling with love and joy. His step aroused her, she looked round; a faint exclamation escaped her, and she dropped her pencil.
"Thank heaven that I find you as I do, alone, Clara," said he, picking up the fallen pencil, and kneeling on one knee by her side after he did so. They were eye to eye now, and both were greatly agitated.
"Alone, Clara," said he, taking her unresisting hand, "how are you here alone?"
"Miss Sampler has just left me; did not you meet her?"
"And what were the wild waves saying?" she asked, smiling honestly and fondly down on his upturned face.
"They seemed to sing to me of love and you, Clara," he answered, in the same joyous manner, and drawing her towards him he kissed her tenderly, passionately, and there was no need for declaring the love that filled his heart and trembled on his lips, and yet he did so in words that filled her heart with mingled joy and fear--joy, for they were such as no young girl could have heard unmoved when addressed to herself--and a great fear, as she thought of her father, and all his words flashed on her memory. She grew pale, and even when Derval's kisses were pressed upon her cheek in that sequestered place, she glanced round her fearfully.
"And you love me in return, Clara, my own Clara?" he murmured, caressing her tenderly after their first incoherences were over.
"Yes, oh yes, Derval, I love you!" she replied.
"It is said to be fortunate for us, that the future is a sealed book," said he, drawing her head and face caressingly into his neck and his breast, "yet I should like to have known that the little girl whose life I saved in Bermuda was to be my wife--my own darling wife--in the years to come!"