‘My own soul!’

’When I tell you all that happened at that time, I shall indeed speak to you as if your soul and mine were one.  It may be wrong to tell you—­you may despise me for not keeping such things a secret for ever.  I cannot tell whether I am right or wrong to do this.  Is your love like mine?’

‘I would say it was greater, if you were not so above me in all things.’

’Wilfrid, I was dying in my loneliness.  It would not have been hard to die, for, if I was weak in everything else, at least my love for you would have grown to my last breath.  If I speak things which I should only prove in silence, it is that you may not afterwards judge me hardly.’

‘You shall tell me,’ Wilfrid replied, ’when you are my wife.  Till then I will hear nothing but that you are and always have been mine.’

They came to a great tree about the trunk of which had been built a circular seat.  The glades on every side showed no disturbing approach.

‘Let us sit here,’ said Wilfrid.  ’We have always talked with each other in the open air, haven’t we?’

He drew her to him and kissed her face passionately.  It was the satisfying of a hunger of years.  With Beatrice his caresses had seldom been other than playful; from the first moment of re-meeting with Emily, he had longed to hold her to his heart.

‘Can I hope to keep you now?  You won’t leave me again, Emily?’

‘If I leave you, Wilfrid, it will be to die.’

Again he folded her in his arms, and kissed her lips, her cheeks, her eyes.  She was as weak as a trembling flower.

’Emily, I shall be in dread through every moment that parts us.  Will you consent to whatever I ask of you?  Once before I would have taken you and made you my wife, and if you had yielded we should have escaped all this long misery.  Will you now do what I wish?’

She looked at him questioningly.

’Will you marry me as soon as it can possibly be?  On Monday I will do what is necessary, and we can be married on Wednesday.  This time you will not refuse?’

‘Wednesday?’

’Yes.  One day only need intervene between the notice and the marriage; it shall be at the church nearest to you.’

‘Wilfrid, why do you—­’

Fear had taken hold upon her she could not face the thought.  Wilfrid checked her faint words with his lips.

‘I wish it,’ he said, himself shaken with a tempest of passion which whelmed the last protest of his conscience.  ’I shall scarcely tear myself from you even till then.  Emily, Emily, what has my life been without your love?  Oh, you will be the angel that raises me out of the ignoble world into which I have fallen!  Hold me to you—­make me feel and believe that you have saved me!  Emily, my beautiful, my goddess! let me worship you, pray to you!  Mine now, mine, love, for ever and ever!