Aminta drove her questioning heart as a vessel across blank circles of sea, where there was nothing save the solitary heart for answer.  It answered intelligibly and comfortingly at last, telling her of proof given that she could repose under his guidance with absolute faith.  Was ever loved woman more blest than she in such belief?  She had it firmly; and a blessedness, too, in this surety wavering beneath shadows of the uncertainty.  Her eyes knew it, her ears were empty of the words.  Her heart knew it, and it was unconfirmed by reason.  As for his venturing to love her, he feared none.  And no sooner did that reflection surge than she stood up beside him in revolt against her lion and lord.  Her instinct judged it impossible she could ever have yielded her heart to a man lacking courage.  Hence—­what? when cowardice appeared as the sole impediment to happiness now!

He had gone, and the day lived again for both of them—­a day of sheer gold in the translation from troubled earth to the mind.  One another’s beauty through the visage into the character was newly perceived and worshipped; and the beauties of pastoral Thames, the temple of peace, hardly noticed in the passing of the day—­taken as air to the breather; until some chip of the scene, round which an emotion had curled, was vivid foreground and gateway to shrouded romance:  it might be the stream’s white face browning into willow-droopers, or a wagtail on a water-lily leaf, or the fore-horse of an up-river barge at strain of legs, a red-finned perch hung a foot above the pebbles in sun-veined depths, a kingfisher on the scud under alders, the forest of the bankside weeds.

CHAPTER XXV

PREPARATIONS FOR A RESOLVE

That day receded like a spent billow, and lapsed among the others advancing, but it left a print deeper than events would have stamped.  Aminta’s pen declined to run to her lord; and the dipping it in ink was no acceleration of the process.  A sentence, bearing likeness to an artless infant’s trot of the half-dozen steps to mother’s lap, stumbled upon the full stop midway.  Desperate determination pushed it along, and there was in consequence a dead stop at the head of the next sentence.  A woman whose nature is insurgent against the majesty of the man to whom she must, among the singular injunctions binding her, regularly write, sees no way between hypocrisy and rebellion.  For rebellion, she, with the pen in her hand, is avowedly not yet ripe, hypocrisy is abominable.

If she abstained from writing, he might travel down to learn the cause; a similar danger, or worse, haunted the writing frigidly.  She had to be the hypocrite or else—­leap.

But an honest woman who is a feeling woman, when she consents to play hypocrite, cannot do it by halves.  From writing a short cold letter, Aminta wrote a short warm one, or very friendly.  Length she could avoid, because she was unable to fill a page.  It seemed that she could not compose a friendly few lines without letting her sex be felt in them.  What she had put away from her, so as not to feel it herself, the simulation of ever so small a bit of feeling brought prominently back; and where she had made a cast for flowing independent simplicity, she was feminine, ultra-feminine to her reading of it.