The metaphor was a little confused, but that did not signify.  The whole image was essentially Greek to Leam, and she only knew that it sounded well and did somehow apply to her—­that she had just awakened out of sleep, and was for the first time using her wings and living in the upper air.

“I have not really lived till now,” she answered.  “And now things seem different.”

“In what way?” asked Edgar, smiling.

He knew what she meant, but he wanted to hear her reveal herself.

She smiled too.  “More beautiful,” she said, a little vaguely.

“As what?  I like to be precise, and I want to know exactly what my darling thinks and means.”

He said this with his most bewitching smile and in his tenderest voice.  It was so pleasant to him to receive these first shy, confused confessions.

“The flowers and the sky,” said Leam, raising her eyes and looking through the garden and on to the gray and narrowed horizon.  “I remember when flowers were weeds and one day was like another.  I did not know if the sun shone or not.  But this year seems now to have been always summer and sunshine.  The very weeds are more lovely than the flowers used to be.”

“Flowers and sunshine since you knew me, my darling?”

“Yes,” she answered shyly.

Edgar glanced at the heavy clouds hanging over head, but he did not say that he found this gray day singularly gloomy and oppressive, and that even love could not set a fairy sun in the sky.  He took up the second clause of her loving speech:  “And I am your flower?  What a precious little compliment!  I hope I shall be your amaranth, my Leam—­your everlasting flower—­if a rough soldier may have such a pretty comparison made in his favor.  Do you think I shall be everlasting to you?”

“When God dies my love will die, and not before,” said Leam, with her grave fervor, her voice of concentrated passion.

Her voice and manner thrilled Edgar.  Her words, too, in their very boldness were more exciting than the most refined commonplaces of other women.  It was this union of more than ordinary womanly reticence with almost savage passion and directness that had always been Leam’s charm to Edgar; nevertheless, he hesitated for a few minutes, thinking whether he should correct her manner of speech or not, and while loving chasten her.  Finally, he decided that he would not.  She was only his lover as yet:  when she should be his wife it would then be time enough to teach her the subdued conventionalism of English feeling as interpreted by the English tongue used commonly by gentlemen and ladies.  Meanwhile, he must give her her head, as he inwardly phrased it, so as not frighten her in the beginning and thus make the end more difficult.