what they might have been at
their best, by Cornelia's failure to be frank with her. If she was
wronging Charmian by making her a half-confidant only, she could not be
more open with her than with Ludlow, and she must let her think that
she had told him everything until she had told him everything.

She did honestly try to do so, from time to time; she tried to lead him
on to ask her what it was he had kept her from telling him in that
first moment of their newly confessed love, when it would have been
easier than it could ever be again. She reproached him in her heart for
having prevented her then; it seemed as if he must know that she was
longing for his help to be frank; but she never could make that cry for
his help pass her lips where it trembled when she ought to have felt
safest with him. She began to be afraid of him, and he began to be
aware of her fear.

He went home after parting with her that first night of their
engagement too glad of all that was, to feel any lack in it; but the
first thought in his mind when he woke the next morning was not that
perfect joy which the last before he fell asleep had been. His
discomfort was a formless emotion at first, and it was a moment before
it took shape in the mistake he had made, in forbidding Cornelia to
tell him what she had kept from him, merely because he knew that she
wished to keep it. He ought to have been strong enough for both, and he
had joined his weakness to hers from a fantastic impulse of generosity.
Now he perceived that the truth, slighted and postponed, must right
itself at the cost of the love which it should have been part of. He
began to be tormented with a curiosity to know what he could not ask,
or let her suspect that he even wished to know. Whether he was with her
or away from her, he always had that in his mind, and in the small
nether ache, inappeasable and incessant, he paid the penalty of his
romantic folly. He had to bear it and to hide it. Yet they both seemed
flawlessly happy to others, and in a sort they seemed so to themselves.
They waited for the chance that should make them really so.

Cornelia kept on at her work, all the more devotedly because she was
now going home so soon and because she knew herself divided from it by
an interest which made art seem slight and poor, when she felt secure
in her happiness, and made it seem nothing when her heart misgave her.
She never could devolve upon that if love failed her; art could only