“Do I not know you?” he said.

The melodious bass notes, expressive of conviction on that point, signified as well as the words that no answer was the right answer.  She could not dissent without turning his music to discord, his complacency to amazement.  She held her tongue, knowing that he did not know her, and speculating on the division made bare by their degrees of the knowledge, a deep cleft.

He alluded to friends in her neighbourhood and his own.  The bridesmaids were mentioned.

“Miss Dale, you will hear from my aunt Eleanor, declines, on the plea of indifferent health.  She is rather a morbid person, with all her really estimable qualities.  It will do no harm to have none but young ladies of your own age; a bouquet of young buds:  though one blowing flower among them . . .  However, she has decided.  My principal annoyance has been Vernon’s refusal to act as my best man.”

“Mr. Whitford refuses?”

“He half refuses.  I do not take no from him.  His pretext is a dislike to the ceremony.”

“I share it with him.”

“I sympathize with you.  If we might say the words and pass from sight!  There is a way of cutting off the world:  I have it at times completely:  I lose it again, as if it were a cabalistic phrase one had to utter.  But with you!  You give it me for good.  It will be for ever, eternally, my Clara.  Nothing can harm, nothing touch us; we are one another’s.  Let the world fight it out; we have nothing to do with it.”

“If Mr. Whitford should persist in refusing?”

“So entirely one, that there never can be question of external influences.  I am, we will say, riding home from the hunt:  I see you awaiting me:  I read your heart as though you were beside me.  And I know that I am coming to the one who reads mine!  You have me, you have me like an open book, you, and only you!”

“I am to be always at home?” Clara said, unheeded, and relieved by his not hearing.

“Have you realized it?—­that we are invulnerable!  The world cannot hurt us:  it cannot touch us.  Felicity is ours, and we are impervious in the enjoyment of it.  Something divine! surely something divine on earth?  Clara!—­being to one another that between which the world can never interpose!  What I do is right:  what you do is right.  Perfect to one another!  Each new day we rise to study and delight in new secrets.  Away with the crowd!  We have not even to say it; we are in an atmosphere where the world cannot breathe.”

“Oh, the world!” Clara partly carolled on a sigh that sunk deep.

Hearing him talk as one exulting on the mountain-top, when she knew him to be in the abyss, was very strange, provocative of scorn.

“My letters?” he said, incitingly.

“I read them.”

“Circumstances have imposed a long courtship on us, my Clara; and I, perhaps lamenting the laws of decorum—­I have done so!—­still felt the benefit of the gradual initiation.  It is not good for women to be surprised by a sudden revelation of man’s character.  We also have things to learn—­there is matter for learning everywhere.  Some day you will tell me the difference of what you think of me now, from what you thought when we first . . . ?”