ic groups?"

"You'll certainly catch cold standing in that wet grass; do come in and
let me shut the blinds," she said, for she had found cheerful lamplight
the best corrective for his vagaries.

So he came in and sat in his special arm-chair, and they chatted about
miscellaneous village topics for an hour. The standpoint from which they
canvassed Plainfield people and things was a peculiarly outside one.
Their circle of two was like a separate planet from which they observed
the world. Their tone was like, and yet quite unlike, that in which
a long-married couple discuss their acquaintances; for, while their
intellectual intimacy was perfect, their air expressed a constant mutual
deference and solicitude of approbation not to be confounded with the
terrible familiarity of matrimony; and at the same time they constituted
a self-sufficient circle, apart from the society around them, as man and
wife cannot. Man and wife are so far merged as to feel themselves a unit
over against society. They are too much identified to find in each other
that sense of support and countenance which requires a feeling of the
exteriority of our friend's life to our own. If these two should
marry, they would shortly find themselves impelled to seek refuge in
conventional relations with that society of which now they were calmly
independent.

At length Mr. Morgan rose and threw open the blinds. The radiance of the
full harvest-moon so flooded the room that Miss Eood was fain to blow
out the poor lamp for compassion. "Let us take a walk," he said.

The streets were empty and still, and they walked in silence, spelled by
the perfect beauty of the evening. The dense shadows of the elms lent a
peculiarly rich effect to the occasional bars and patches of moonlight
on the street floor; the white houses gleamed among their orchards; and
here and there, between the dark tree-stems, there were glimpses of
the shining surface of the broad outlying meadows, which looked like a
surrounding sea.

Miss Rood was startled to see how the witchery of the scene possessed
her companion. His face took on a set, half-smiling expression, and he
dropped her arm as if they had arrived at the place of entertainment to
which he had been escorting her. He no longer walked with measured pace,
but glided along with a certain stealthiness, peering on this side and
that down moony vistas and into shadow-bowers, as if half-expecting,
if he might step lightly enough, to c