found a beloved master,
able and willing to lighten all her burdens; a physician, whose
slightest touch brought balm and healing to every aching wound. And so
these two when the time came, spite of the absence of friends who should
have been there, spite of warnings and denunciations and evil
prophecies, stood up and said to those who listened what their hearts
had long before confessed, that they were one for time and eternity;
then, hand in hand, went out into the world.

For the present it was a pleasant enough world to them. Surrey had a
lovely little place on the Hudson to which he would carry her, and
pleased himself by fitting it up with every convenience and beauty that
taste could devise and wealth supply.

How happy they were there! To be sure, nobody came to see them, but then
they wished to see nobody; so every one was well satisfied. The
delicious lovers' life of two years before was renewed, but with how
much richer and deeper delights and blissfulness! They galloped on many
a pleasant morning across miles and miles of country, down rocky slopes,
and through wild and romantic glens. They drove lazily, on summer noons,
through leafy fastnesses and cool forest paths; or sat idly by some
little stream on the fresh, green moss, with a line dancing on the
crystal water, amusing themselves by the fiction that it was fishing
upon which they were intent, and not the dear delight of watching one
another's faces reflected from the placid stream. They spent hours at
home, reading bits of poems, or singing scraps of love-songs, talking a
little, and then falling away into silence; or she sat perched on his
knee or the elbow of his chair, smoothing his sunny hair, stroking his
long, silky mustache, or looking into his answering eyes, till the world
lapsed quite away from them, and they thought themselves in heaven.

An idle, happy time! a time to make a worker sigh only to behold, and a
Benthamite lift his hands in deprecation and despair. A time which would
not last, because it could not, any more than apple-blossoms and May
flowers, but which was sweet and fragrant past all describing while it
endured.

Some _kindly_ disposed person sent Surrey a city paper with an item
marked in such wise as to make him understand its unpleasant import
without the reading. "Come," he said, "we will have none of this; this
owl does not belong to our sunshine,"--and so destroyed and forgot it.
Others, however, saw that which he s