her murmur to Tony, entering the churchyard, among the grave-mounds:  ’Old Ireland won’t repent it!’ and Tony’s rejoinder, at the sight of the bridegroom advancing, beaming:  ’A singular transformation of Old England!’—­and how, having numberless ready sources of laughter and tears down the run of their heart-in-heart intimacy, all spouting up for a word in the happy tremour of the moment, they had both bitten their lips and blinked on a moisture of the eyelids.  Now the dear woman was really wedded, wedded and mated.  Her letters breathed, in their own lively or thoughtful flow, of the perfect mating.  Emma gazed into the depths of the waves of crimson, where brilliancy of colour came out of central heaven preternaturally near on earth, till one shade less brilliant seemed an ebbing away to boundless remoteness.  Angelical and mortal mixed, making the glory overhead a sign of the close union of our human conditions with the ethereal and psychically divined.  Thence it grew that one thought in her breast became a desire for such extension of days as would give her the blessedness to clasp in her lap—­if those kind heavens would grant it!—­a child of the marriage of the two noblest of human souls, one the dearest; and so have proof at heart that her country and our earth are fruitful in the good, for a glowing future.  She was deeply a woman, dumbly a poet.  True poets and true women have the native sense of the divineness of what the world deems gross material substance.  Emma’s exaltation in fervour had not subsided when she held her beloved in her arms under the dusk of the withdrawing redness.  They sat embraced, with hands locked, in the unlighted room, and Tony spoke of the splendid sky.  ‘You watched it knowing I was on my way to you?’

‘Praying, dear.’

‘For me?’

‘That I might live long enough to be a godmother.’

There was no reply:  there was an involuntary little twitch of Tony’s fingers.

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