"No, no!" she said, "you must not. You do not know!"
"I know that the moment for which I have waited so long has come at last! I have awaited your summons five years now. Five years! Think of it, Ragna!"
"But you have not yet learned my reasons--"
"That is true," he assented gravely, "but to me the fact that you have come to me is all-sufficing. I am glad that you have done it of your own accord. Think, Ragna, just two weeks ago, I wrote to your Aunt in Christiania to try and trace you. I--I had grown tired of waiting, I realized that I had been a fool from the first, that I should never have let you slip out of my life, and I did, and for so long."
"Yes, yes," she interrupted breathlessly, "you should not have left me!"
"After your answer to my letter, I was afraid of offending you--I thought it would be better to wait until you made some sign--"
"Oh, my foolish letter!" groaned Ragna. "But I was not myself when I wrote it. I was wild with pain and humiliation, I--"
"I know, dear, I know, and it has been my fault if I have lost sight of you through all these years. I realized that in Rome. When I had tried to find some trace of you there, and failed, I wrote to your Aunt. After all that had happened there, Rome was intolerable to me,--you can understand that--and I came here to await an answer."
"Aunt Gitta is dead," said Ragna. Oh how much there was to say, how much that he must know, before she allowed him to go further! And the things he said, or rather implied--his unchanging devotion, his happiness at finding her, were so perilously sweet to hear. In his presence she felt herself transported to another atmosphere, poles apart from the one she had just left. It transformed her, she felt a different creature already.
Still the past must be dealt with; she gathered herself together for the effort of telling him, but as her lips parted, two English ladies entered the drawing-room, followed by a waiter with a tea-tray. They installed themselves at a small table near a window, casting curious glances the while, at the two standing in the middle of the room,--for both Ragna and Angelescu had been too absorbed in one another to remember the small conventionalities of life.