e greater than the sea works;
her thoughts one blush, her brain a fire-fount. This was not like being
seated on a throne.

'There,' said he, loosening his hug, 'now you belong to me! I know you
from head to foot. After that, my darling, I could leave you for years,
and call you wife, and be sure of you. I could swear it for you--my
life on it! That 's what I think of you. Don't wonder that I took my
chance--the first:--I have waited!'

Truer word was never uttered, she owned, coming into some harmony with
man's kiss on her mouth: the man violently metamorphozed to a stranger,
acting on rights she had given him. And who was she to dream of denying
them? Not an idea in her head! Bound verily to be thankful for such
love, on hearing that it dated from the night in Ireland.... 'So in love
with you that, on my soul, your happiness was my marrow--whatever you
wished; anything you chose. It's reckoned a fool's part. No, it's love:
the love of a woman--the one woman! I was like the hand of a clock to
the springs. I taught this old watch-dog of a heart to keep guard and
bury the bones you tossed him.'

'Ignorantly, admit,' said she, and could have bitten her tongue for
the empty words that provoked: 'Would you have flung him nothing?' and
caused a lowering of her eyelids and shamed glimpses of recollections.
'I hear you have again been defending me. I told you, I think, I
wished I had begun my girl's life in a cottage. All that I have had to
endure!.. or so it seems to me: it may be my way of excusing myself:--I
know my cunning in that peculiar art. I would take my chance of mixing
among the highest and the brightest.'

'Naturally.'

'Culpably.'

'It brings you to me.'

'Through a muddy channel.'

'Your husband has full faith in you, my own.'

'The faith has to be summoned and is buffeted, as we were just now on
the hill. I wish he had taken me from a cottage.'

'You pushed for the best society, like a fish to its native sea.'

'Pray say, a salmon to the riverheads.'

'Better,' Redworth laughed joyfully, between admiration of the tongue
that always outflew him, and of the face he reddened.

By degrees her apter and neater terms of speech helped her to a notion
of regaining some steps of her sunken ascendancy, under the weight of
the novel masculine pressure on her throbbing blood; and when he bent to
her to take her lord's farewell of her, after agreeing to go and delight
Emma with a message, her submission and