She loved to listen, feeling that he was drawing her to his way of thinking for the coming years.

“It was the folly and the crime of all ancient religions that their priesthoods veiled them; whenever the veil was rent, like the veil of Isis, it was not God that men found behind it:  it was nothing.  The religions of the future will have no veils.  As far as they can set before their worshippers truth at all, it will be truth as open as the day.  The Great Teacher in the New Testament—­what an eternal lesson on light itself:  that is the beauty of his Gospel.  And his Apostles—­where do you find him saying to them, ’Preach my word to all men as the secrets of a priesthood and the mysteries of the Father’?

“It is the tragedy of man alone that he has his secrets.  No doubt the time will come when I shall have mine and when I shall have to hide things from you, Pansy, as Rowan has his and hides things from us.  Life is full of things that we cannot tell because they would injure us; and of things that we cannot tell because they would injure others.  But surely we should all like to live in a time when a man’s private life will be his only life.”

After a silence he came back to her with a quiet laugh:  “Here I am talking about the future of the human race, and we have never agreed upon our marriage ceremony!  What a lover!”

“I want the most beautiful ceremony in the world.”

“The ceremony of your church?” he asked with great respect, though wincing.

“My church has no ceremony:  every minister in it has his own; and rather than have one of them write mine, I think I should rather write it myself:  shouldn’t you?”

“I think I should,” he said, laughing.

He drew a little book out of his breast pocket:  “Perhaps you will like this:  a great many people have been married by it.”

“I want the same ceremony that is used for kings and queens, for the greatest and the best people of the earth.  I will marry you by no other!”

“A good many of them have used this,” and he read to her the ceremony of his church.

When he finished neither spoke.

It was a clear summer afternoon.  Under them was the strength of rocks; around them the noiseless growth of needful things; above them the upward-drawing light:  two working children of the New World, two pieces of Nature’s quietism.

II

It was the second morning after Marguerite’s ball.

Marguerite, to herself a girl no longer, lay in the middle of a great, fragrant, drowsy bed of carved walnut, once her grandmother’s.  She had been dreaming; she had just awakened.  The sun, long since risen above the trees of the yard, was slanting through the leaves and roses that formed an outside lattice to her window-blinds.