There was a serious pleading in Lydgate’s tone, as if he felt that she would be injuring him by any fantastic delays.  Rosamond became serious too, and slightly meditative; in fact, she was going through many intricacies of lace-edging and hosiery and petticoat-tucking, in order to give an answer that would at least be approximative.

“Six weeks would be ample—­say so, Rosamond,” insisted Lydgate, releasing her hands to put his arm gently round her.

One little hand immediately went to pat her hair, while she gave her neck a meditative turn, and then said seriously—­

“There would be the house-linen and the furniture to be prepared.  Still, mamma could see to those while we were away.”

“Yes, to be sure.  We must be away a week or so.”

“Oh, more than that!” said Rosamond, earnestly.  She was thinking of her evening dresses for the visit to Sir Godwin Lydgate’s, which she had long been secretly hoping for as a delightful employment of at least one quarter of the honeymoon, even if she deferred her introduction to the uncle who was a doctor of divinity (also a pleasing though sober kind of rank, when sustained by blood).  She looked at her lover with some wondering remonstrance as she spoke, and he readily understood that she might wish to lengthen the sweet time of double solitude.

“Whatever you wish, my darling, when the day is fixed.  But let us take a decided course, and put an end to any discomfort you may be suffering.  Six weeks!—­I am sure they would be ample.”

“I could certainly hasten the work,” said Rosamond.  “Will you, then, mention it to papa?—­I think it would be better to write to him.”  She blushed and looked at him as the garden flowers look at us when we walk forth happily among them in the transcendent evening light:  is there not a soul beyond utterance, half nymph, half child, in those delicate petals which glow and breathe about the centres of deep color?

He touched her ear and a little bit of neck under it with his lips, and they sat quite still for many minutes which flowed by them like a small gurgling brook with the kisses of the sun upon it.  Rosamond thought that no one could be more in love than she was; and Lydgate thought that after all his wild mistakes and absurd credulity, he had found perfect womanhood—­felt as if already breathed upon by exquisite wedded affection such as would be bestowed by an accomplished creature who venerated his high musings and momentous labors and would never interfere with them; who would create order in the home and accounts with still magic, yet keep her fingers ready to touch the lute and transform life into romance at any moment; who was instructed to the true womanly limit and not a hair’s-breadth beyond—­docile, therefore, and ready to carry out behests which came from that limit.  It was plainer now than ever that his notion of remaining much longer a bachelor had been a mistake:  marriage