and Karen met as if under an arch of infinite blessings. He had his
cable to show her and she hers to show him, and, although Gregory did
not see them as the exquisite documents that Karen felt them to be, they
did for him all that he asked Madame von Marwitz to do.

"I give her to you. Be worthy of my trust. Mercedes von Marwitz"--his
read. And Karen's: "I could only yield you to a greater joy than you can
find with me--but it could not be to a greater love. Do not forget me in
your happiness. You are mine, my beloved child, not less but more than
ever.--Tante."

Karen's joy was unshadowed. It made him think of primroses and crystal
springs. She was not shy; he was shyer than she, made a little dumb, a
little helpless, by his man's reverence, his man's awed sense of the
beloved's dawn-like wonder. She was not changed; any change in Karen
would come as quiet growth, not as transformation. Gregory's gladness
had not this simplicity. It revealed to him a new world, a world newly
beautiful but newly perilous, and a changed self,--the self of boyhood,
renewed yet transformed, through whose joy ran the reactionary
melancholy that, in a happiness attained, glances at fear, and at a
climax of life, is aware of gulfs of sorrow as yet unsounded. More than
his lover's passion was a tenderness for her and for her unquestioning
acceptances that seemed near tears. Karen was in character so wrought
and in nature so simple. Her subtleties were all objective, subtleties
of sympathy, of recognition, of adaptation to the requirements of
devoted action; her simplicity was that of a whole-heartedness unaware
at high moments of all but the essential.

She had to tell him fully, holding his hand and looking into his eyes,
all about her side of it; what she had thought when she saw him at the
concert--certain assumptions there gave Gregory his stir of
uneasiness--"You were caring just as much as I was--in the same way--for
her music"; what she had thought at Mrs. Forrester's, and at the railway
station, and when the letters went on and on. She had of course seen
what was coming that evening after they had been to the Lavington's;
"When you didn't understand about me and Tante, you know; and I made you
understand." And then he had made her understand how much he cared for
her and she for him; only it had all come so quietly; "I did not think a
great deal about it, or wonder; it sank into me--like stars one sees in
a still lake, so that next