Dinner was announced and nothing more was said.  Paul ate well, Juliet scarcely at all, but she managed to hide from him the offense.  They rose together and returned to the drawing-room.

The moment Faber shut the door Juliet turned in the middle of the room, and as he came up to her said, in a voice much unlike her own: 

“Paul, if I were to do any thing very bad, as bad as could be, would you forgive me?”

“Come, my love,” expostulated Faber, speaking more gently than before, for he had had his dinner, “surely you are not going to spoil our evening with any more such nonsense!”

“Answer me, Paul, or I shall think you do not love me,” she said, and the tone of her entreaty verged upon demand.  “Would you forgive me if I had done something very bad?”

“Of course I should,” he answered, with almost irritated haste, “—­that is, if I could ever bring myself to allow any thing you did was wrong.  Only, you would witch me out of opinion and judgment and every thing else with two words from your dear lips.”

“Should I, Paul?” she said; and lifting her face from his shoulder, she looked up in his from the depths of two dark fountains full of tears.  Never does the soul so nearly identify itself with matter as when revealing itself through the eyes; never does matter so nearly lose itself in spiritual absorption, as when two eyes like Juliet’s are possessed and glorified by the rush of the soul through their portals.  Faber kissed eyes and lips and neck in a glow of delight.  She was the vision of a most blessed dream, and she was his, all and altogether his!  He never thought then how his own uncreed and the prayer-book were of the same mind that Death would one day part them.  There is that in every high and simple feeling that stamps it with eternity.  For my own part I believe that, if life has not long before twinned any twain, Death can do nothing to divide them.  The nature of each and every pure feeling, even in the man who may sin away the very memory of it, is immortal; and who knows from under what a depth of ashes the love of the saving God may yet revive it!

The next moment the doctor was summoned.  When he returned, Juliet was in bed, and pretended to be asleep.

In the morning she appeared at the breakfast table so pale, so worn, so troubled, that her husband was quite anxious about her.  All she would confess to was, that she had not slept well, and had a headache.  Attributing her condition to a nervous attack, he gave her some medicine, took her to the drawing-room, and prescribed the new piano, which he had already found the best of all sedatives for her.  She loathed the very thought of it—­could no more have touched it than if the ivory keys had been white hot steel.  She watched him from the window while he mounted his horse, but the moment the last red gleam of Ruber vanished, she flung her arms above her head, and with a stifled cry threw herself on a couch, stuffed