Explore "The Sealed Message" by Fergus Hume on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
No; Gerald has not kissed her. He wished to very badly, but something in his heart -- a strong sense of honor maybe -- prevented his doing so until he had made his position clear to her. She was so simple, so innocent, so virginal that she knew nothing of passion, or of life, or of that world wherein women marry and are given in marriage. With an almost absurd particularity the young man desired that, before being kissed, she should learn that he was her true lover, that he wished to marry her, that he greatly desired to enter into a lifelong companionship with her. To act otherwise was to bind her unknowingly to him. When she understood what love meant, and was ready to accept him as her husband, then could he seal this acceptance with a kiss. For he knew full well that such a kiss would awaken the woman in her; would reveal life to her soul. A caress meant so much, that it was little wonder he restrained himself from following too hurriedly the desire of his heart.
And perhaps it was that he found her innocence and friendly acceptance of his presence too delightful to transmute with unconsidered haste friendship into love. Why spoil this idyll of lilies by presenting her with the red ripe roses of love? The romance was so charming, so dreamlike, that the poetic instinct of the poet forbade him to rouse her. Mavis was indeed the Sleeping Beauty, slumbering within her enchanted palace, and he, the fated Prince -- as it would seem he was from his finding of the cylinder -- would in time awaken her with a kiss. But the hour had not yet struck. When it did, many things would come to pass.