ere?"

Emilia pressed his hand, but without turning her face to him, as
her habit was. He took it for shyness, and encouraged her with soft
exclamations and expansive tenderness.

"I wish I had not come here!" she murmured.

"Tell me why?" He folded his arm about her waist.

"Why did you let me wait?" said she.

Wilfrid drew out his watch; blamed the accident that had detained him,
and remarked that there were not many minutes to witness against him.

She appeared to throw off her moodiness. "You are here at last. Let me
hold your hand, and think, and be quite silent."

"You shall hold my hand, and think, and be quite silent, my own girl! if
you will tell me what's on your mind."

Emilia thought it enough to look in his face, smiling.

"Has any one annoyed you?" he cried out.

"No one."

"Then receive the command of your lord, that you kiss him."

"I will kiss him," said Emilia; and did so.

The salute might have appeased an imperious lord, but was not so
satisfactory to an exacting lover. He perceived, however, that, whether
as lover or as lord, he must wait for her now, owing to her having
waited for him: so, he sat by her, permitting his hand to be softly
squeezed, and trying to get at least in the track of her ideas, while
her ear was turned to the weir, and her eyes were on the glowing edges
of the cedar-tree.

Finally, on one of many deep breaths, she said: "It's over. Why were
you late? But, never mind now. Never let it be long again when I am
expecting you. It's then I feel so much at his mercy. I mean, if I am
where I hear falling water; sometimes thunder."

Wilfrid masked his complete mystification with a caressing smile;
not without a growing respect for the only person who could make him
experience the pangs of conscious silliness. You see, he was not a
coxcomb.

"That German!" Emilia enlightened him.

"Your old music-master?"

"I wish it, I wish it! I should soon be free from him. Don't you know
that dreadful man I told you about, who's like a black angel to me,
because there is no music like his? and he's a German! I told you how I
first dreamed about him, and then regularly every night, after talking
with my father about Italy and his black-yellow Tedeschi, this man came
over my pillow and made me call him Master, Master. And he is. He seems
as if he were the master of my soul, mocking me, making me worship him
in spite of my hate. I came here, thinking only of you. I heard the
wat