They spoke no more.  His soul was drowned in her kiss.  Supporting her, whose strength was gone, he, almost as weak as she, hung over her, and clasped her closer, closer, till they were as one body, and in the oblivion her lips put upon him he was free to the bliss of her embrace.  Heaven granted him that.  He placed her in a chair and knelt at her feet with both arms around her.  Her bosom heaved; her eyes never quitted him:  their light as the light on a rolling wave.  This young creature, commonly so frank and straightforward, was broken with bashfulness in her husband’s arms—­womanly bashfulness on the torrent of womanly love; tenfold more seductive than the bashfulness of girlhood.  Terrible tenfold the loss of her seemed now, as distantly—­far on the horizon of memory—­the fatal truth returned to him.

Lose her? lose this?  He looked up as if to ask God to confirm it.

The same sweet blue eyes! the eyes that he had often seen in the dying glories of evening; on him they dwelt, shifting, and fluttering, and glittering, but constant:  the light of them as the light on a rolling wave.

And true to him! true, good, glorious, as the angels of heaven!  And his she was! a woman—­his wife!  The temptation to take her, and be dumb, was all powerful:  the wish to die against her bosom so strong as to be the prayer of his vital forces.  Again he strained her to him, but this time it was as a robber grasps priceless treasure—­with exultation and defiance.  One instant of this.  Lucy, whose pure tenderness had now surmounted the first wild passion of their meeting, bent back her head from her surrendered body, and said almost voicelessly, her underlids wistfully quivering:  “Come and see him—­baby;” and then in great hope of the happiness she was going to give her husband, and share with him, and in tremour and doubt of what his feelings would be, she blushed, and her brows worked:  she tried to throw off the strangeness of a year of separation, misunderstanding, and uncertainty.

“Darling! come and see him.  He is here.”  She spoke more clearly, though no louder.

Richard had released her, and she took his hand, and he suffered himself to be led to the other side of the bed.  His heart began rapidly throbbing at the sight of a little rosy-curtained cot covered with lace like milky summer cloud.

It seemed to him he would lose his manhood if he looked on that child’s face.

“Stop!” he cried suddenly.

Lucy turned first to him, and then to her infant, fearing it should have been disturbed.

“Lucy, come back.”

“What is it, darling?” said she, in alarm at his voice and the grip he had unwittingly given her hand.

O God! what an Ordeal was this! that to-morrow he must face death, perhaps die and be torn from his darling—­his wife and his child; and that ere he went forth, ere he could dare to see his child and lean his head reproachfully on his young wife’s breast—­for the last time, it might be—­he must stab her to the heart, shatter the image she held of him.