These things are possible.  Friendship is excellent, and friendship may be called love; but it is not love.  It may be more enduring and placidly satisfying in the end; it may be better, and wiser, and more prudent, for acquaintance to beget esteem, and esteem regard, and regard affection, and affection an interchange of peaceful vows:  the result, a well-ordered life and home.  All this is admirable, no doubt; an owl is a bird when you can get no other; but the love born of a moment, yet born of eternity, which comes but once in a lifetime, and to not one in a thousand lives, unquestioning, unthinking, investigating nothing, proving nothing, sufficient unto itself,—­ah, that is divine; and this divine ecstasy filled these two souls.

Unconsciously.  They did not define nor comprehend.  They listened to the sea where they sat, and felt tears start to their eyes, yet knew not why.  They were silent, and thought they talked; or spoke, and said nothing.  They danced; and as he held her hand and uttered a few words, almost whispered, the words sounded to the listening ear like a part of the music to which they kept time.  They saw a multitude of people, and exchanged the compliments of the evening, yet these people made no more impression upon their thoughts than gossamer would have made upon their hands.

“Come, Francesca!” said Clara Russell, breaking in upon this, “it is not fair for you to monopolize my cousin Will, who is the handsomest man in the room; and it isn’t fair for Will to keep you all to himself in this fashion.  Here is Tom, ready to scratch out his eyes with vexation because you won’t dance with him; and here am I, dying to waltz with somebody who knows my step,—­to say nothing of innumerable young ladies and gentlemen who have been casting indignant and beseeching glances this way:  so, sir, face about, march!” and away the gay girl went with her prize, leaving Francesca to the tender mercies of half a dozen young men who crowded eagerly round her, and from whom Tom carried her off with triumph and rejoicing.

The evening was over at last, and they were going away.  Tom had said good night.

“You are to be in New York, at my uncle’s, Clara tells me.”

“It is true.”

“I may see you there?”

For answer she put out her hand.  He took it as he would have taken a delicate flower, laid his other hand softly, yet closely, over it, and, without any adieu spoken, went away.

“Tom always declared Willie was a little queer, and I’m sure I begin to think so,” said Clara, as she kissed her friend and departed to her room.

CHAPTER V

  “A breathing sigh, a sigh for answer,
  A little talking of outward things.”

  JEAN INGELOW

Ah, the weeks that followed!  People ate and drank and slept, lived and loved and hated, were born and died,—­the same world that it had been a little while before, yet not the same to them,—­never to seem quite the same again.  A little cloud had fallen between them and it, and changed to their eyes all its proportions and hues.