and testing the depth
of your inferiority to themselves. I believed she was only studying and
weighing my outer appearance, of which I was far more confident than of
the inner personality. So I met the blue, soft-shaded eyes in the flare
of the sunlight without embarrassment, and smiled back into them as I
joined her.

"Well, darling, now come," I said; "I think I have made that idiot
understand your hand-bag is not to be shaken!"

Lucia pushed a little pale gloved hand through my arm, impetuously, and
said, as we turned to follow the decline of the platform towards the
carriage,--

"Victor! you are so good-looking!"

I laughed. I was right, then. She had only been thinking of the
exterior. What a comfort! A few steps had brought us to the carriage
door, and the servant was holding it open. I waited to answer her till
we had started, but when she had got in, and I had followed, she threw
herself back on the cushions and put one hand on my shoulder, and
before I could speak she went on in a low voice,--

"Yes! It is very charming now, of course; but all the same you have
nearly killed me!"

The words were spoken with such a bitter, tremulous vehemence, that I
turned and looked at her in startled silence. Her eyes still passed
keenly backwards and forwards over my face.

"Oh, yes! if you knew one-tenth of what I have suffered this last year!
how I have coveted--longed. It doesn't matter what I say to you now,
does it! Oh, I am so glad that all this terrible repression and
restraint is done away with, and that we are free to do and say what we
like! I am so glad I am your wife at last!"

The trembling, excited accents, springing straight from her thoughts,
and poured into my ear from her warm, parting lips, stirred my own
tolerably well-governed feelings to a painful intensity, and I felt
only too sharply that I, at any rate, had not done with self-restraint.
I said nothing. I was rendered dumb by the riot within me, but I pushed
my arm round her waist and drew her against me.

The violence and want of tenderness in the action pleased her, perhaps,
being a woman. The waist yielded gladly, and the whole form sank
against me with relaxed and satisfied pleasure.

We neither of us spoke again until the carriage drew up between the
bright green of the larches, stabbed through with long shafts of light,
and before the shallow steps and open windows of the house. On each
side of the steps stood, not classic urns to