A Struggle for a Ring — page 317: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

DRESSING A RIVAL. 313 cause you were going away for years. You owe me that one kiss; will you give it to me now?” | His face flushed; hers, in thé moonlight, shone pure and pale as a star. He would rather not have done it, but the sweet, wistful eyes were fixed on his. Well, if one kiss could make her happy—it was not much—it would be absurd to refuse it; and, after all, she was his wife. He bent down and kissed her. She looked at him again with a sweet, grave dignity, that touched him very much. ‘*Do not think that I am profane,” she said; ‘‘ but that seems to me almost a sacrament. Do you think there is anything in the wide world more beautiful and more en- nobling than the kiss of the man you love?” He laughed uneasily. ‘‘You are an enthusiast, Ailie; good-night.” ‘* Good-night, ” she replied. She stopped for one moment to watch him as he hastened back to Black Charlie. ‘‘The time shall come,” she said, ‘‘God helping me, when you shall give me a kiss with your heart in it,” While Lord Carsdale, as he hastened back to Black Charlie, said to himself: ‘This must not happen again. I did not like to make her miserable by saying so, but it must be the last time that she follows me. I shall have to leave home through it.” Yet, though he was vexed and annoyed, he could not help feeling half flattered by her persistent, devoted love. ‘‘T wish she did not care so much about me,” he thought. ‘*I shall never care for her.” So he said, and so he thought; but as he rode home through the sweet, dewy twilight, he thought, more than once, of the passionate loveliness of that fair face, of the music of the sad voice. He thought of her after that night. cComicboo Ss.