She was immensely moved to see him so moved.  She was also entirely at a loss.  How strangely different things always were from forecasts of them!  They had suddenly taken the long-expected stride away from their former relation, but she did not know where they had arrived.  What was the new status between them?  What did Austin think she meant?  It came to her with a shock that the new status between them was, on the surface, exactly what it was in reality; that the avowed relation between them was, as far as it went, precisely in accord with the facts of the case.  The utter strangeness of this in any human relationship filled her with astonishment, with awe, almost with uneasiness.  It seemed unnatural not to have to pretend anything!

Apparently it did not seem unnatural to the man beside her.  “You are a very wonderful woman,” he now said, his voice still but partly under his control.  “I had not thought that you could exist.”  He took her hand again and continued more steadily:  “Will you let me, for a little while longer, go on living near you?  Perhaps things may seem clearer to us both, later—­”

Sylvia was swept by a wave of gratitude as for some act of magnanimity. “You are the wonderful one!” she cried.  Not since the day Helene had told her who he was, had she felt so whole, so sound, so clean, as now.  The word came rushing on the heels of the thought:  “You make one feel so clean!” she said, unaware that he could scarcely understand her, and then she smiled, passing with her free, natural grace from the memorable pause, and the concentration of a great moment forward into the even-stepping advance of life.  “That first day—­even then you made me feel clean—­that soap! that cold, clean water—­it is your aroma!”

Their walk along the silent water, over the great lawn, and up the steps was golden with the level rays of the sun setting back of them, at the end of the canal, between the distant, sentinel poplars.  Their mood was as golden as the light.  Sometimes they spoke, sometimes they were silent.  Truth walked between them.

Sylvia’s mind, released from the tension of that great moment, began making its usual, sweeping, circling explorations of its own depths.  Not all that it found was of an equal good report.  Once she thought fleetingly:  “This is only a very, very pretty way of saying that it is all really settled.  With his great wealth, he is like a reigning monarch—­let him be as delicate-minded as he pleases, when he indicates a wish—­” More than once—­many, many times—­Felix Morrison’s compelling dark eyes looked at her penetratingly, but she resolutely turned away her head from them, and from the impulse to answer their reproach even with an indignant, well-founded reproach of her own.  Again and again she felt a sweet strangeness in her new position.  The aroma of utter sincerity was like the scent of a wildflower growing in the sun, spicy, free.  She wondered