oken Leam
Dundas betimes, and that fate and fortune had made him her prospective
proprietor. "She will make me happy," he said as his last thought:
he forgot to add either assurance or hope that he should make her the
same. That is not generally part of a man's matrimonial calculations.

The confidence of love soon grows. When Leam came back to the seat
under the cut-leaved hornbeam, where Edgar still waited for her
to have the pleasure of watching her approach, she was not so much
ashamed and oppressed as when he had first found her there. She did
not want to run away, and she was losing her fear of wrongdoing. She
was beginning instead to feel that delightful sense of dependence on a
strong man's love which--_pace_ the third sex born in these odd latter
times--is the most exquisite sensation that a woman can know. She was
no longer alone--no longer an alien imprisoned in family bonds, but,
though one of a family, always an alien and imprisoned, never homed
and united. Now she was Edgar's as she had been mamma's; and there
was dawning on her the consciousness of the same oneness, the same
intimate union of heart and life and love, as she had had with mamma.
She belonged to him. He loved her, and she--yes, she knew now that she
had always loved him, had always lived for him. He was the secret
god whom she had carried about with her in her soul from the
beginning--the predestined of her life, now for the first time
recognized--the only man whom she could have ever loved. To her
intense and single-hearted nature change or infidelity was an
unimaginable crime, something impossible to conceive. Had she not met
Edgar she would never have loved any one, she thought: having met him,
it was impossible that she should not have loved him, the ideal to her
as he was of all manly nobleness and grace, given to her to love by a
Power higher than that of chance.

She was dimly conscious of this deep sense of rest in her new-found
joy as she came across the lawn in her pretty summer dress of pearly
gray touched here and there with crimson--the loveliest creature to be
seen for miles around. Her usually mournful face was brightened with
an inner kind of bliss which, from the face of the Tragic Muse, made
it the face of a youthful seraph serene and blessed; her smile was
one of almost unearthly ecstasy, if it still retained that timid,
tremulous, fleeting expression which was so beautiful to Edgar; her
eyes, no longer sad and sorrowful