I tried to speak, but the words came almost as a sob.  Quickly I threw my arms about his neck and, bending his face towards me, kissed him of my own accord as he smiled; then, breaking from him, would have run homewards.

But he held me by the hand.

“When shall I come to-morrow?” asked he, hoarsely.

“Not at all,” said I.  “Go, Gabriel!  God help me; I love you too much!”

And so we did not meet next day, and the next we were married.

* * * * *

For many months I made believe that we were happy.  Ah! it was not all make-belief!  I have had great joys.

Never was the game of happiness easier to play at than it was for Gabriel and me in the first year of our marriage.  He was very much attached to me, and I loved him.

It was the first time he had been out of England; the sights he saw filled him with rapture and insatiable curiosity, to appease which I led him from place to place until I had shown him all I knew, and still we went onwards, covering new ground together.

We never stayed very long in the same spot; a certain weariness crept over me at times, but I saw that it was best for him to keep continually on the wing; and indeed, having no desire on earth but his happiness, I was ready, for his sake, to wander my whole life away.  Moreover, as he was not working at all the while, I looked forward to a day when inspiration might set in, together with satiety, when he too might yearn, as I did, to sit in peace beside a hearth of his own.

Constance wrote to us occasionally, and I to her.  Her letters to me were the same as of old, full of love and sweetness; she nearly always mentioned Gabriel, but not in such a way as to denote preoccupation.  My letters to her were not as they had been; I felt this at the time.  On rereading them just now I burned them all,—­there was no breath in them.

Mrs. Rayner had taken Fairview, the nearest house to Fletcher’s Hall, soon after my marriage, and set her cap at Uncle George with so much persistence that he engaged himself to her the following summer.  So my sweet girl stayed on at Graysmill.  Grandmamma’s letters, and Aunt Caroline’s, were always full of her, of the comfort her sunny presence brought them; my father-in-law and Jane had the same tale to tell.

For many months I never even contemplated the possibility of returning to England with my husband.  There is no knowing how long our wanderings might have been, but for my illness.  Gabriel and I were passing through Pisa at the end of June, on our way to Lerici, whither we were bent on pilgrimage, when I fell ill.

That was the end of many dreams.  The wheel could turn no more; the swift and restless life of day to day, that fled the past and hung back from the morrow, was checked abruptly, completely.

But, lying in that little bed of painted wood, staring at the net curtains and green shutters, at the lozenge pattern on the wall, at the cornucopiae on the ceiling, a clear and sober sight returned to me.  The body having failed, the spirit found its strength.