What dear acknowledgments (alas! too deceitful,)
flowed from her guileless lips, even during that first
interview. With a candour and unreservedness that spring
alone from unsophisticated manners and an untainted heart,
she admitted, that the instant she beheld me, she felt
she had found the being her fancy had been so long tutored
to linger on, and her heart to love. She was sure I was
come to be her husband (for she had understood from her
aged attendant that a man who loved a woman wished to be
her husband); and she was glad her pet stag had been
wounded, since it had been the means of procuring her
such happiness. She was not cruel enough to take pleasure
in the sufferings of the poor animal; for she would nurse
it, and it would soon be well again; but she could not
help rejoicing in its disaster, since that circumstance
had been the cause of my finding her out, and loving her
even as she loved me. And all this was said with her head
reclining on my chest, and her beautiful countenance
irradiated with a glow that had something divine in the
simplicity of purpose it expressed.
"On my demanding to know whether it was not her face I
had seen at the opening in the cliff, she replied that
it was.
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