my spring evenings you felt, and knew not why,
that your life was incomplete."

And Aurora, mechanically pulling off her rings and putting them into the
brass receptacle, then taking them out of it and putting them back on
her fingers, while she chattered, describing the advantages of a
furnished villa at Antiniano, to be preferred because they were some
Italian friends of Leslie's who desired to let it, was in her inmost
speaking to the inmost of Gerald. The hardly self-conscious meanings
within her bosom made as if an extension of her in the air, comparable
to the halo around the moon on a misty night; and this atomized radiance
had language, it said: "Oh, to draw your head down where it desires to
be! To warm and comfort you! To be to you everything you need! I lean to
you, I cling to you like a vine with every winding tendril. But I am so
afraid of you! so afraid! I am of common, you of finest, clay. How can I
give into any hand so much power to hurt me? If I were to dare it, then
find I could not make you happy, your disappointment would be my
heart-break, and my tragedy might spoil your life. But this know,
Gerald, dearer to me for having been so unhappy, nothing my life could
contain without you would seem to me so good as life with you in a poor
workman's attic, under falling snow, and I to make it home for you!"

While two souls thus trembled and gravitated toward each other, bathing
in each other's light, it is almost mortifying to have to show to what
degree that which took place at the surface was different and inferior;
to what degree the fine abandon of words spoken and actions performed in
thought was replaced by a shivering prudence keeping guard on one side,
and on the other a deplorable timidity trying awkwardly to be bold.

Heard through the door, the scene that ensued between these two curious
lovers, when they had worked their way through preliminaries and come to
the point at which they had parted after the day at Vallombrosa, must
particularly have seemed lacking in purple and poetry; for then the soft
light in Aurora's eyes would not have been seen, nor the deep flash in
Gerald's, as he by a point scored felt himself nearer to the goal.

"Now, what made you run off like that, I want to know," Aurora asked in
the flowing American which she reserved for real friends and sincere
moments, "after you'd said when you left me at the door, 'Good-by till
to-morrow'?"

"My reasons were several, all sim