“All these things ought to be optional.  If a woman loves one man so much she wants to stay with him for ever and ever, probably through such a great passion she reaches her highest development; but until she has found that man she ought to be allowed to go from one to another without any disgrace attaching to it.  And, of course, just the same law holds good for the man.”

“Outsiders like the world and the law ought never to be allowed to interfere between a man and a woman.  They never can know the right or the wrong of their relations to each other well enough to enable them to be judges.  Nobody ever knows but the man and the woman themselves, and they ought to be left alone; what they do, whether in quarrelling or love, ought to be as private as the prayers one sends to Heaven.”

She paused, and through the window came the gay, loud, triumphant call of the cuckoo seeking its mate of an hour in the heart of the glad green wood.

Viola listened with a look of delight.

“How happy they are!” she said.  And the note came again, instinct with love and joy.

“How well Nature arranged everything, and how Man has spoiled it all!  Fancy passion, the most subtle, evanescent, delicate, elusive emotion—­and yet one so strong—­fancy that being bound down by crabbed and crooked laws, being confined by wretched little conventions!”

“But, anyway, we shall have to say we are married here.”

“Oh, say anything you like,” rejoined Viola laughing; “saying doesn’t do any harm.”

“Yes, but then we must fix some place where we’ve been married and all that, do you see; we’d better go somewhere further off I think and stay away some time and come back married.  I do feel very worried about it, Viola.  I think it would be much simpler to do it than to lie about it.”

Viola jumped up and came over to me.

“Dear Trevor, I am so sorry you are worried, but really it will work out all right.  We will go abroad somewhere from here, we might go to Rome, it’s a lovely time of year, and then to Sicily, to Taormina, ... and we’ll stay away a year and you finish the picture and I’ll write an opera, and then we’ll come back married to town in the season and we’ll have been married before we leave England of course, and then it will be a year ago, and I don’t think anybody will bother about it much.”

I looked down upon her.  She was so pretty and so dear to me:  I must keep her, and if those were the only terms upon which she would stay with me I must accept them.

The landlady came into the room at this minute followed by the maid to lay the luncheon; in the landlady’s hand was a fat, black book which she presented diffidently to Viola.

“It’s the Visitors’ book, ma’am,” she said.  “I thought you and the gentleman would like to write your names in it in case of any letters....”

“Yes, very much,” returned Viola promptly, with a little side smile at me, and sat down and wrote in it.