Morrison, lounging in a chair with a book, looked up, startled at her whirlwind entrance.  “What’s up?” he inquired.

At the sound of his voice, she checked herself and pirouetted with a thistle-down lightness to face him.  Her face, always like a clear, transparent vase lighted from within, now gave out, deeply moved as she was, an almost visible brightness.  “Judith!” she cried, her voice ringing like a silver trumpet, “Judith and Arnold!” She was poised like a butterfly, and as she spoke she burst into flight again, and was gone.

She had not been near him, but the man had the distinct impression that she had thrown herself on his neck and kissed him violently, in a transport of delight.  In the silent room, still fragrant, still echoing with her passage, he closed his book, and later his eyes, and sat with the expression of a connoisseur savoring an exquisite, a perfect impression....

* * * * *

Tea that afternoon was that strangest of phenomena, a formal ceremony of civilized life performed in the abashing and disconcerting presence of naked emotion.  Arnold and Judith sat on opposite sides of the pergola, Judith shining and radiant as the dawn, her usually firmly set lips soft and tremulous; Arnold rather pale, impatient, oblivious to what was going on around him, his spirit prostrated before the miracle; and when their starry eyes met, there flowed from them and towards them from every one in the pergola, a thousand unseen waves of excitement.

The mistress of the house herself poured tea in honor of the great occasion, and she was very humorous and amusing about the mistakes caused by her sympathetic agitation.  “There!  I’ve put three lumps in yours, Mr. Sommerville.  How could I!  But I really don’t know what I’m doing.  This business of having love-at-first-sight in one’s very family—!  Give your cup to Molly; I’ll make you a fresh one.  Oh, Arnold!  How could you look at Judith just then!  You made me fill this cup so full I can’t pass it!”

Mr. Sommerville, very gallant and full of compliments and whimsical allusions, did his best to help their hostess strike the decent note of easy pleasantry; but they were both battling with something too strong for them.  Unseconded as they were by any of the others, they gave a little the effect of people bowing and smirking to each other at the foot of a volcano in full eruption.  Morrison, picking up the finest and sharpest of his conversational tools, ventured the hazardous enterprise of expressing this idea to them.  Mrs. Marshall-Smith, trying one topic after another, expressed an impatience with the slow progress of a Henry James novel she was reading, and Mr. Sommerville, remarking with a laugh, “Oh, you cannot hurry Henry,” looked to see his mild witticism rewarded by a smile from the critic.  But Morrison shook his head, “No, my dear old friend. Il faut hurler avec les loups—­especially if you are so wrought up by their hurlements that you can’t hear yourself think.  I’m just giving myself up to the rareness, the richness of the impression.”