“Why are we here?  This is not our right road.  Where are we going?”

“I did not mean to come this way, but we missed the train, and cannot reach London tonight; so I thought we would post across country to E____,” naming a quiet cathedral town, “where you can rest, and go on when or where you please.  Will that do?”

“Oh yes.”

“You are not dissatisfied?  We could not help missing the
Train, you see.”

“Oh no.”

The quick, sharp, querulous answers—­that last refuge of a fictitious strength that was momentarily breaking down—­he saw it all, this good man, this generous, pitiful-hearted man, who knew what sorrow was, and who for a whole year had watched her with the acuteness which love alone teaches, especially the love which, coming late in life, had a calmness and unselfishness which youthful love rarely possesses.  The sort of love which, as he had once quoted to her out of an American book, could feel, deeply and solemnly, “that if a man really loves a woman, he would not marry her for the world, were he not quite sure he was the best person she could by any possibility marry”—­that is, the one who loved her so perfectly that he was prepared to take upon himself all the burden of her future life, her happiness or sorrow, her peculiarities, shortcomings, faults, and all.

This, though he did not speak a word, was written, plain as in a book, on the face of Christian’s husband, as he watched her, still silently, for another mile, till the early winter sun-set, bursting through the leaden-colored, snowy sky, threw a faint light in at the carriage window.

Christian looked up, and closed her eyes again in a passive hopelessness sad to see.

Her husband watched her still.  Once he sighed—­a rather sad sigh for a bridegroom, and then a light, better and holier than love, or rather the essence of all love, self-denial and self-forgetfullness, brightened up his whole countenance.

“How very tired she is; but I shall take care of her, my poor child!”

The words were as gentle as if he had been speaking to one of his own children, and he drew her to him with a tender, protecting fatherliness which seemed the natural habit of his life, such as never, in her poor, forlorn life, had any one shown to Christian Oakley.  It took away all her doubts, all her fears.  For the moment she forgot she was married, forgot everything but his goodness, his tenderness, his care over her, and her great and sore need of the same.  She turned and clung to him, weeping passionately.

“I have nobody in the world but you.  Oh, be kind to me!”

“I will,” said Arnold Grey.

Chapter 2

    "You’ll love me yet!  And I can tarry
     Your love’s protracted growing: 
     June reaped that bunch of flowers you carry
     From seeds of April’s sowing."