A deep, all-pervading contentment surrounded Jasper Penny, an unreasoning, happy warmth.  He said nothing, his stick now striking on the boards, now sinking into earth, and gazed down at Susan, her face hid by the rim of her bonnet.  This companionship was the best, all, that life had to offer.  He felt no need to importune her about the future, their marriage; curiously it seemed as though they had been married, and were walking in the security, the peace, of a valid and enduring bond.  There was no necessity for talk, laborious explanation, periods infinitely more empty than this silence.  They walked as close to each other as her skirt would permit; and at times her muff, swinging on a wrist, would brush softly against him.  How strangely different the actual values of existence were from the emphasized, trite moments and emotions.  In the middle of his life, at the point of his greatest capability for experience, his most transcendent happiness came from the present, the deliberate, unquestioning walk with Susan, the aimless progress through an invisible city and under a masked clear heaven of stars.  No remembered thrill compared with it, reached the same height, achieved a similar dignity of consummation.

The way became more uneven; low clustered sheds rose out of the darkness against a deeper black beyond, and they came to the river.  The bank was marshy, but a track of pounded oyster shells, visible against the mud, led to a wharf extending into the solid, voiceless flow of the water.  Jasper Penny stood with Susan gazing into the blanketing gloom.  A wan, disintegrated radiance shone from a riding light in the rigging of a vessel, and a passing warm blur flattened over the wet deck as a lantern was carried forward.  No other lights, and no movement, rose from the river; no sound was audible at their back.  The city, from the evidence of Jasper Penny’s sensibilities, did not exist; it had fallen out of his consciousness; suddenly its bricked miles, its involved life stilled or hectic, stealthy in the dark, seemed a thing temporary, adventitious; he had an extraordinary feeling of sharing in a permanence, a continuity, outlasting stone, iron, human tradition.  He had been swept, he thought, into a movement where centuries were but the fretful ticking of seconds.  “Outside death,” he said fantastically, unconsciously aloud.  A remarkable sentence recurred to him, the most profound, he told himself, ever written:  “Before he was I am.”  Its vast implications easily evaded his finite mind, just as the essence of his present rapture—­it was no less—­lay beyond his grasp.  He lingered over it; gave it up ... returned to Susan.

“Wonderful,” she said gravely, with a comprehensive wave of her muff.  And her simplicity thrilled him the more with the knowledge that she shared his feeling.  She drew up the fur collar of her cloak, shivered; and, in the wordless harmony that pervaded them, they turned and retraced their way.