A temptation had come to Theophil.  At first he put it aside.  Then passion, wiser for once than reason, told him that it was a necessity, and he knew that passion was right.  A week of the fortnight had gone, and Theophil remembered that Isabel would now be in the neighbourhood of certain famous woods where in his boyhood he had often wandered, and he remembered that she was to have the Monday quite free.  That Monday they should spend together in those enchanted woods.  His secular business often took him to towns thirty or forty miles away, and it was not startling for him not to return till late at night.  Thus Isabel and he should steal their one day out of all the years.

So there went a note without one word of love in it to tell Isabel that love was coming by the morning train; and so on that morning Isabel stood waiting for love at that little wayside station, and presently, with a mighty rushing sound of iron and brass, love came and stood very quietly by her side, and looked into her eyes.

They took each other’s hands quietly, and left the station without a word; nor did they speak for a long while, walking blissfully side by side through a village street which was to take them to the green and lonely woods.  Soon the houses were passed, and they still walked on silent, listening to the song of their nearness.

Now, as they drank each other’s presence through every feasting nerve, they knew how starved they had been.  As the lane narrowed and gloomed green, dipping through caverns of bright leaves, they drew closer, and smiled gently on each other; but they were not going to speak for a long while yet.  Had they not come away into this loneliness that they might be silent together, that they might sit, hour after hour, and just watch each other, lost in an ecstasy of contemplation, a trance of recognition, a fascination that was almost fearful, that was so kind and yet so cruel in its very power?

The woods are very still, but there is nothing in the world so still as these two lovers, as they lie down on the green earth and gaze on each other, hour after hour.  When they find a word as great as their silence, they will speak it—­but they will find none except it be “Isabel,” except it be “Theophil.”

And great passion has as little use for caresses as for words, and kisses, which gay sensual love gathers greedily like little golden flowers, and pays for nimbly with little, pretty words, will be almost as rare as words.

Kisses! it is not to eat bonbons that these two have come out into the woods.

Kisses! what kiss of the blind lips could match the kiss of those rapt tragic eyes!

Kisses are but the diminutives of the great word “love;” they are but the small change of passion, meteorites, star-dust of the great and terrible planet.

Their souls are swung high above time and space in one never-ending kiss,—­the kiss of that predestined irrefragable union, of which meetings and partings and kisses and caresses and words, and every other fragmentary mode of expression, are but trivial accidents, to which distance is still nearness, and nearness is still distance.