But he only held her closer, and laughed such a happy laugh that Sylvia
felt the truth before he uttered it.

"How could I marry, loving you? How could I forget you even if I had
never come to tell you this? Sylvia, I know much that has passed.
Geoffrey's failure gave me courage to hope for success, and that the
mute betrothal made with a look so long ago had been to you all it has
been to me."

"Adam, you are both right and wrong,--you do not know all,--let me tell
you,"--began Sylvia, as these proofs of ignorance brought her to herself
with a shock of recollection and dismay. But Warwick was as absolute in
his happiness as he had been in his self-denial, and took possession of
her mentally as well as physically with a despotism too welcome and
entire to be at once resisted.

"You shall tell me nothing till I have shown the cause of my
hard-seeming silence. I must throw off that burden first, then I will
listen to you until morning if you will. I have earned this moment by a
year of effort, let me keep you here and enjoy it without alloy."

The old charm had lost none of its power, for absence seemed to have
gifted it with redoubled potency, the confirmation of that early hope to
grace it with redoubled warmth. Sylvia let him keep her, feeling that he
had earned that small reward for a year's endeavor, resolving to grant
all now left her to bestow, a few moments more of blissful ignorance,
then to show him his loss and comfort him, sure that her husband would
find no disloyalty in a compassion scarcely less deep and self-forgetful
than his own would have been had he shared their secret. Only pausing to
place himself upon the seat she had left, Warwick put off her hat, and
turning her face to his regarded it with such unfeigned and entire
content her wavering purpose was fixed by a single look. Then as he
began to tell the story of the past she forgot everything but the rapid
words she listened to, the countenance she watched, so beautifully
changed and softened, it seemed as if she had never seen the man before,
or saw him now as we sometimes see familiar figures glorified in dreams.
In the fewest, kindest words Warwick told her of Ottila, the promise and
the parting; then, as if the dearer theme deserved less brevity, he
lingered on it as one lingers at a friend's door, enjoying in
anticipation the welcome he is sure awaits him.

"The night we walked together by the river--such a wilful yet winning
comrade as I