u! I was quite a young girl when I
loved you first. That, I said, shall be my husband, or I will never have
one. And I knew so little how to win your thought. How ashamed it makes
me to think of things I said and did in those days!'

She was silent, leaning her head against his shoulder.

'Do you ever think of me as I was at Dunfield?' she asked presently,
with timid utterance, hardly above her breath, risking what she had
never yet dared.

'No,' he answered, 'I think of the present.'

His voice was a little hard, from the necessity of commanding it.

'You did not know that I loved you then? Think of me! Pity me!'

He made no answer. Beatrice spoke again, her face veiled against him,
her arms pressing closer.

'You love me with perfect love? I have your whole heart?'

'I love you only, Beatrice.'

'And with love as great as you ever knew? Say that to me--Wilfrid, say
that!' She clung to him with passion which was almost terrible. 'Forgive
me! Only remember that you are my life, my soul! I cannot have less than
that.'

He would have been cased in triple brass if music such as this had not
melted into his being. He gave her the assurance she yearned for, and,
in giving it, all but persuaded himself that he spoke the very truth.
The need of affirming his belief drew from him such words as he had the
secret of; Beatrice sighed in an anguish of bliss.

'Oh, let me die now! It is only for this that I have lived.'

Wilfrid had foreseen and dreaded this questioning. From any woman it was
sooner or later to be expected, and Beatrice was as exacting as she was
passionate. She knew herself, and strove hard to subdue these
characteristics which might be displeasing to Wilfrid; her years of
hopelessness, of perpetual self-restraint, were of aid to her now; three
months had passed without a word from her which directly revived the old
sorrows. Her own fear of trenching on indiscretion found an ally in
Wilfrid's habitual gravity; her remark, at their meeting, on his mood
was in allusion to a standing pleasantry between them; she had
complained that he seldom looked really happy in her presence. It was
true; his bearing as a rule was more than sober. Beatrice tormented
herself to explain this. He was not in ordinary intercourse so
persistently serious, though far more so than he had been in earlier
years, the change dating, as Beatrice too well had marked, from the time
of his supreme misery. With the natural and becoming