He blushed like a school-girl, and strenuously protested that it was not so. In his haste he fell headlong into the sin of hastiness--as was but natural--and said perhaps too much.
“Your coming, Mademoiselle?” he echoed. “Nay but even had I been sad, your coming must have dispelled my melancholy as the coming of the sun dispels the mist upon the mountains.”
“A poet?” She mocked him playfully, with a toss of black curls and a distracting glance of eyes blue as the heavens above them. “A poet, Monsieur, and I never suspected it, for all that I held you a great scholar. My father says you are.”
“Are we not all poets at some season of our lives?” quoth he, for growing accustomed to her presence--ravished by it, indeed--his courage was returning fast and urging him beyond the limits of discretion.
“And in what season may this rhyming fancy touch us?” she asked. “Enlighten me, Monsieur.”
He smiled, responsive to her merry mood, and his courage ever swelling under the suasion of it, he answered her in a fearless, daring fashion that was oddly unlike his wont. But then, he was that day a man transformed.
“It comes, Mademoiselle, upon some spring morning such as this--for is not spring the mating season, and have not poets sung of it, inspired and conquered by it? It comes in the April of life, when in our hearts we bear the first fragrant bud of what shall anon blossom into a glorious summer bloom red as is Love's livery and perfumed beyond all else that God has set on earth for man's delight and thankfulness.”
The intensity with which he spoke, and the essence of the speech itself, left her a moment dumb with wonder and with an incomprehensible consternation, born of some intuition not yet understood.
“And so, Monsieur, the Secretary,” said she at last, a nervous laugh quivering in her first words, “from all this wondrous verbiage I am to take it that you love?”
“Aye, that I love, dear lady,” he cried, his eyes so intent upon her that her glance grew timid and fell before them. And then, a second later, she could have screamed aloud in apprehension, for the book of Jean Jacques Rousseau lay tumbled in the grass where he had flung it, even as he flung himself upon his knees before her. “You may take it indeed that I love--that I love you, Mademoiselle.”