ral town, "where you can rest, and go on
when or where you please. Will that do?"

"Oh yes."

"You are not dissatisfied? We could not help missing the
Train, you see."

"Oh no."

The quick, sharp, querulous answers--that last refuge of a fictitious
strength that was momentarily breaking down--he saw it all, this good
man, this generous, pitiful-hearted man, who knew what sorrow was,
and who for a whole year had watched her with the acuteness which
love alone teaches, especially the love which, coming late in life, had a
calmness and unselfishness which youthful love rarely possesses. The
sort of love which, as he had once quoted to her out of an American
book, could feel, deeply and solemnly, "that if a man really loves a
woman, he would not marry her for the world, were he not quite sure
he was the best person she could by any possibility marry"--that is, the
one who loved her so perfectly that he was prepared to take upon
himself all the burden of her future life, her happiness or sorrow, her
peculiarities, shortcomings, faults, and all.

This, though he did not speak a word, was written, plain as in a book,
on the face of Christian's husband, as he watched her, still silently, for
another mile, till the early winter sun-set, bursting through the
leaden-colored, snowy sky, threw a faint light in at the carriage
window.

Christian looked up, and closed her eyes again in a passive
hopelessness sad to see.

Her husband watched her still. Once he sighed--a rather sad sigh for a
bridegroom, and then a light, better and holier than love, or rather the
essence of all love, self-denial and self-forgetfullness, brightened up his
whole countenance.

"How very tired she is; but I shall take care of her, my poor child!"

The words were as gentle as if he had been speaking to one of his own
children, and he drew her to him with a tender, protecting fatherliness
which seemed the natural habit of his life, such as never, in her poor,
forlorn life, had any one shown to Christian Oakley. It took away all
her doubts, all her fears. For the moment she forgot she was married,
forgot everything but his goodness, his tenderness, his care over her,
and her great and sore need of the same. She turned and clung to him,
weeping passionately.

"I have nobody in the world but you. Oh, be kind to me!"

"I will," said Arnold Grey.

Chapter 2

_"You'll love me yet! And I can tarry
Your love's protracted g