readily be destroyed. Break it rudely, even shock it a
little, and a chasm may yawn where, before, there was a silken thread
of union, tender in its fibre, but beautifully elastic.

You may exclaim, when you read these confidences and remember others to
which I have confessed, that I was not so awkward a lover as I
sometimes appeared to be. No, I was not awkward in thought, but I
could be, I know full well, very awkward in its expression as deeds.
Often I would go wrong in form, rarely in feeling, if you can assume a
man built on those colliding lines.

Marget has told me, in raillery, that she was more than once tempted to
give me "a good shaking," as the woman's saying goes. It was not,
perhaps, that she expected to shake much out of me, or to shake me out
of myself, but that she would herself have been relieved by the
exercise, for women, you see, are like that.

My reflection has to do with a day when we spoke of it as settled that
the Black Colonel would never come back, that the whole episode which
he represented was over, and that an open road, undisturbed surely by
any more surprises and alarms, lay before us. How could I forget the
scene, for it was to open out our true life, our deep, full love.

She looked at me as much as to ask had I been planning a stratagem, I
the unsophisticated, which I had not. She looked again, and I saw she
knew, that at long length, we were face to face with the soft realities
which, hitherto, had remained dumb, or only whispered. I waited to
take her in my arms, and she told me later her instinct expected me to
do it, and I didn't. What poor fools men may be, to miss so much, and
to place a good woman in the position of having her consent rebuffed,
for that is to outrage her sex-respect.

I seem to remember that Marget turned her head away in despair with me,
only she pretended to be watching the sun and the clouds as they dipped
the hills in light and shadow. This threw her face into profile, and I
thought I had never seen it quite so beautiful. There was an expectant
vibrancy in it, from the fair forehead to the dimpled chin, but its
flower of expression was in the flowing eye, the ripe mouth, and the
tremulous lips.

"A wonderful scene," she said, her look lost in the river and the
hills; "a scene which makes one think in parables, as the old men of
Scriptures did."

"Parables," I replied, remembering, as I saw she did, "are very
unuseful."

"Why do you say t