to none of them, and they
do not press her to give it, with that respect for a child's liberty
which is also American, they are growing more and more uneasy with the
suspicion that it was serious on her part, too. They love her
extraordinarily, and she has always dearly loved them. They show their
love by protecting her youth from a step she may repent. She shows hers
by being strong, poor love, and trying not to grieve them with the
revelation of her heart. And they are making one another wretched."

For a moment Mrs. Hawthorne had nothing to say, busy with pondering what
she had heard. "I don't see how, if she really loves this Italian, she
could give him up so gracefully," she finally said.

"She has not given him up, Mrs. Hawthorne," said Gerald. "Believe me,
she has not. She has some plan, some dream, for bringing about the good
end in time without aid from her parents. I am sure of it. No, she has
not given him up." He had before him, vivid in memory, the image of
Brenda in the little church, and was looking at that, though his eyes
were on Mrs. Hawthorne's friendly and attentive face. "She is at the
wonderful hour of her love," he said, "when the world is transfigured
and life lifted above the every-day into regions of poetry; when the
simple fact of his existence justifies the plan of creation, when to
wait a hundred years for him would seem no more difficult than to wait a
day, and to perform the labors of Hercules no more than breaking off so
many roses. She is sure of him, the immortality of his passion, as she
is sure of herself. So they are above circumstances, and nothing that
friend or foe can do should trouble their essential serenity."

"How wonderful!" breathed Mrs. Hawthorne, after a little silence in
which Gerald had been thinking with a very sickness of sympathy of
Brenda and the sinister propensity of the Fates for bringing to nothing
the most valiant dreams and hopes; and Mrs. Hawthorne had been thinking
entirely of Gerald, whose own heart was so much more certainly revealed
by what he said than could be anybody else's.

"Unfortunately,"--he turned abruptly to another part of his
subject,--"he is not of the same temperament. She has some project, I
imagine, for earning the money for her dowry, poor child, by music,
singing, painting. But he does not know her vows of fidelity, because
her parents did use their authority so far as gently to request her not
to write to him or see him; and she pro