, but dewy, tender, bashful, shone
with the purity, the confidence, the self-abandonment of a young
girl's first and happy love: every gesture, every line, seemed to have
gained a greater grace and richness since yesterday; and as she came
up to her lover, and laid her hand in his when he rose to meet her
and looked for one shy instant into his eyes, then dropped her own in
shame-faced tremor at what they had seen and told, he said again to
himself that he had done well. If even she should call the hounds at
a hunt-dinner _dogs_, and say that hunting was stupid and cruel, what
might not be forgiven to Such beauty, such love as hers?

Yes, he was satisfied with himself and with her; and with himself
because of her. He had done well, and she was eminently the right kind
of wife for him, let conventional cavilers say what they would. He
never felt more reconciled to fortune and himself than he did to-day
when he rode by the side of the carriage wherein Leam and Fina sat,
and looked through the coming years to the time when he should have a
little Fina of his own with her mother Leam's dark eyes and her mother
Leam's devoted heart.

The day was perfect, so was the place. Both were all that the day and
place of young love should be. The view from the castle heights, with
the river below, the woods around and the moor beyond, was always
beautiful, but to-day, in the full flush of the early summer, it was
at its best. The golden sunshine, alternating with purple shadows, was
lying in broad tracts on meadow and moor, and lighting up the forest
trees so that the delicate tints and foliage of bough and branch came
out in photographic clearness; the river, where it caught the sun
like a belt of silver, where it was under the shadow like a band of
lapis-lazuli, ran like a vein of life through the scene, and its
music could be heard here where they stood; close at hand the old gray
ivy-covered ruins, with their stories and memories of bygone times,
seemed to add to the vivid fervor of the moment by the force
of contrast--that past so drear and old, the present so full of
passionate hope and love; while the shadows of things that had once
been real trooped among the ruins and flitted in and out the desert
places, chased by laughing girls and merry children, as life chases
death, youth drives out age, and the summer rises from the grave of
winter. It was a day, a scene, to remember for life, even by those to
whom it brought nothing