She smiles,—­takes your hand, for she will not let you grow angry,—­

“I was thinking, Clarence, whether this Laura Dalton would, after all, make a good wife,—­such an one as you would love always?”

VII.

A Good Wife.

The thought of Nelly suggests new dreams that are little apt to find place in the rhapsodies of a youthful lover.  The very epithet of a good wife mates tamely with the romantic fancies of a first passion.  It is measuring the ideal by too practical a standard.  It sweeps away all the delightful vagueness of a fairy dream of love, and reduces one to a dull and economic estimate of actual qualities.  Passion lives above all analysis and estimate, and arrives at its conclusions by intuition.

Did Petrarch ever think if Laura would make a good wife; did Oswald ever think it of Corinne?  Nay, did even the more practical Waverley ever think it of the impassioned Flora?  Would it not weaken faith in their romantic passages, if you believed it?  What have such vulgar, practical issues to do with that passion which sublimates the faculties, and makes the loving dreamer to live in an ideal sphere where nothing but goodness and brightness can come?

Nelly is to be pitied for entertaining such a thought; and yet Nelly is very good and kind.  Her affections are without doubt all centred in the remnant of the shattered home; she has never known any further and deeper love; never once fancied it even—­

—­Ah, Clarence, you are very young!

And yet there are some things that puzzle you in Nelly.  You have found accidentally, in one of her treasured books,—­a book that lies almost always on her dressing-table,—­a little withered flower with its stem in a slip of paper, and on the paper the initials of—­your old friend Frank.  You recall, in connection with this, her indisposition to talk of him on the first evening of your return.  It seems—­you scarce know why—­that these are the tokens of something very like a leaning of the heart.  It does occur to you that she too may have her little casket of loves; and you try one day very adroitly to take a look into this casket.

——­You will learn later in life that the heart of a modest, gentle girl is a very hard matter for even a brother to probe; it is at once the most tender and the most unapproachable of all fastnesses.  It admits feeling by armies, with great trains of artillery,—­but not a single scout.  It is as calm and pure as polar snows; but deep underneath, where no footsteps have gone, and where no eye can reach but one, lies the warm and the throbbing earth.