You don't know? My father has come back. I am a
wealthy heiress. Both he and my mother leave me completely free to
decide my own fate. I am free--do you understand?"
Seized with a kind of frenzy, Raphael grasped Pauline's hands and
kissed them eagerly and vehemently, with an almost convulsive caress.
Pauline drew her hands away, laid them on Raphael's shoulders, and
drew him towards her. They understood one another--in that close
embrace, in the unalloyed and sacred fervor of that one kiss without
an afterthought--the first kiss by which two souls take possession of
each other.
"Ah, I will not leave you any more," said Pauline, falling back in her
chair. "I do not know how I come to be so bold!" she added, blushing.
"Bold, my Pauline? Do not fear it. It is love, love true and deep and
everlasting like my own, is it not?"
"Speak!" she cried. "Go on speaking, so long your lips have been dumb
for me."
"Then you have loved me all along?"
"Loved you? _Mon Dieu_! How often I have wept here, setting your room
straight, and grieving for your poverty and my own. I would have sold
myself to the evil one to spare you one vexation! You are MY Raphael
to-day, really my own Raphael, with that handsome head of yours, and
your heart is mine too; yes, that above all, your heart--O wealth
inexhaustible! Well, where was I?" she went on after a pause.
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