"I haven't done such a thing since I was a child not much taller than
a dandelion," returned Balder. He was not ethereal enough to follow
Gnulemah in her apparently fanciful flight, else might he have lighted
on a discovery to which all the good sense and logic in the world
would not have brought him.
"Yes; we have made these chains before!" reiterated Gnulemah, looking
at her companion in a preoccupied manner. "They were to have chained
us together forever."
"We should have made them of stronger stuff then. But which of us
broke the chain?"
"They took us away from each other, and it was never finished. Do you
remember nothing?"
"The present is enough for me," said her lover; and he finished his
necklace with a handsome clasp of blossoms, and threw it over her
neck. She gave a low sigh of satisfaction.
"I have been waiting for it ever since that time! And here is mine for
you."
Thus adorned by each other's hands, their love seemed greater than
before, and they laughed from pure delight. Their bonds looked
fragile; yet it would need a stronger wrench to part them than had
they been cables of iron or gold, unsustained by the subtile might of
love.
"Let us link them together," proposed Balder; and, loosening a link of
his chain, he reunited it inside Gnulemah's. "We must keep together,"
he continued with a smile, "or the marriage-bonds will break."
"Is this marriage, Balder? to be tied together with flowers?"
"One part of marriage. It shows the world that we belong only to each
other."
"How could they help knowing that,--for to whom else could we
belong? besides, why should they know?"
"Because," answered Balder after some consideration, "the world is
made in such a way, that unless we record all we do by some visible
symbol, everything would get into confusion."
"No no," protested Gnulemah, earnestly. "Only God should know how we
love. Must the world know our words and thoughts, and how we have sat
beneath these trees?--Then let us not be married!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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