Seated beside him, with bosom at heave and shut mouth, in a strange land, travelling cloud-like, rushing like the shower-cloud to the vale, this Carinthia, suddenly wedded, passionately grateful for humbleness exalted, virginly sensible of treasures of love to give, resembled the inanimate and most inspiring, was mindless and inexpressive, past memory, beyond the hopes, a thing of the thrilled blood and skylark air, since she laid her hand in this young man’s.  His not speaking to her was accepted.  Her blood rather than recollection revived their exchanges during the dance at Baden, for assurance that their likings were one, their aims rapturously one; that he was she, she he, the two hearts making one soul.

Could she give as much as he?  It was hardly asked.  If we feel we can give our breath of life, the strength of the feeling fully answers.  It bubbles perpetually from the depth like a well-spring in tumult.  Two hearts that make one soul do not separately count their gifts.

For the rest, her hunger to admire disposed her to an absorbing sentience of his acts; the trifles, gestures, manner of this and that; which were seized as they flew, and swiftly assimilated to stamp his personality.  Driving was the piece of skill she could not do.  Her husband’s mastery of the reins endowed him with the beauty of those harmonious trotters he guided and kept to their pace; and the humming rush of the pace, the smooth torrent of the brown heath-knolls and reddish pits and hedge-lines and grass-flats and copses pouring the counter-way of her advance, belonged to his wizardry.  The bearing of her onward was her abandonment to him.  Delicious as mountain air, the wind sang; it had a song of many voices.  Quite as much as on the mountains, there was the keen, the blissful, nerve-knotting catch of the presence of danger in the steep descents, taken as if swallowed, without swerve or check.  She was in her husband’s hands.  At times, at the pitch of a rapid shelving, that was like a fall, her heart went down; and at the next throb exalted before it rose, not reasoning why;—­her confidence was in him; she was his comrade whatever chanced.  Up over the mountain-peaks she had known edged moments, little heeded in their passage, when life is poised as a crystal pitcher on the head, in peril of a step.  Then she had been dependent on herself.  Now she had the joy of trusting to her husband.

His hard leftward eye had view of her askant, if he cared to see how she bore the trial; and so relentlessly did he take the slopes, that the man inside pushed out an inquiring pate, the two grooms tightened arms across their chests.  Her face was calmly set, wakeful, but unwrinkled:  the creature did not count among timid girls—­or among civilized.  She had got what she wanted from her madman—­mad in his impulses, mad in his reading of honour.  She was the sister of Henrietta’s husband.  Henrietta bore the name she had quitted.  Could madness go beyond the marrying of the creature?  He chafed at her containment, at her courage, her silence, her withholding the brazen or the fawnish look-up, either of which he would have hated.