Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 131: what you’re looking at

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

114 THE COURT OF LONDON and bliss came over her, and she suffered him genily to remove her bonnet and her thick winter shawl. Then he smoothed down her shining auburn hair, and toyed with her long glossy ringlets that framed her blushing cheeks and swept over her shoulders; and the maiden felt how delicious it was to love and be beloved. “You told me that you had so much to say to me, George,’ she murmured, her words appearing to borrow a more liquid intonation from the moistness of the inviting re | lips between which they passed. | “Yes, my angel,” he replied, his own voice becoming more tender and seductively low, “I wished to make you comprehend how sincerely, how devotedly I love you. But now that we are together, my feelings are so intense that it seems as if no‘ language were capable of explaining them. J am lost, as.it were, in the contemplation of the boundlessness of my love, to which I can no more assign a limit than even the wisest philosopher can form an idea of infinite space or eternity. For my love is as vast as space and as enduring as time itself; and I know not how to describe it otherwise. ‘Tell me, dearest, have you ever, when gazing at night up into the vault of heaven, studded with stars, — have you ever fancied that your soul expands with the greatness of that empyrean space which it contem- plates? And then, after striving to penetrate in imagination into the mysteries which le beyond, have you felt your spirit return, as it were, to its clay, wing-weary, humbled, and dissatisfied? If such have ever’ been your sensations, you can conceive how vain it is for me to seek to measure the illimitable love which I bear you, how useless to cal- culate its immensity, and how depressed becomes my soul when I cannot find words to shape the ideas which I would fain convey to your comprehension.” Octavia hung with rapture and delight upon every syllable that fell, in such soft and melting harmony, trom the lips of her lover; and so lost was she in the dreamlike voluptuousness that enveloped her as with a halo, so com- pletely did she abandon herself to the heavenly vision that seemed to have stolen over her senses, that she observed not the strange light which burned in Harley’s eyes, as his devouring regards were fixed upon her. Then he bent his face down so that his cheeks reposed against hers; and GOmichdooks (E(0)