But Mrs. Lovell’s delicacy was still manifest:  Edward came alone, and he and Dahlia were left apart.

There was no need to ask for pardon from those gentle eyes.  They joined hands.  She was wasted and very weak, but she did not tremble.  Passion was extinguished.  He refrained from speaking of their union, feeling sure that they were united.  It required that he should see her to know fully the sinner he had been.  Wasted though she was, he was ready to make her his own, if only for the sake of making amends to this dear fair soul, whose picture of Saint was impressed on him, first as a response to the world wondering at his sacrifice of himself, and next, by degrees, as an absolute visible fleshly fact.  She had come out of her martyrdom stamped with the heavenly sign-mark.

“Those are the old trees I used to speak of,” she said, pointing to the two pines in the miller’s grounds.  “They always look like Adam and Eve turning away.”

“They do not make you unhappy to see them, Dahlia?”

“I hope to see them till I am gone.”

Edward pressed her fingers.  He thought that warmer hopes would soon flow into her.

“The neighbours are kind?” he asked.

“Very kind.  They, inquire after me daily.”

His cheeks reddened; he had spoken at random, and he wondered that Dahlia should feel it pleasurable to be inquired after, she who was so sensitive.

“The clergyman sits with me every day, and knows my heart,” she added.

“The clergyman is a comfort to women,” said Edward.

Dahlia looked at him gently.  The round of her thin eyelids dwelt on him.  She wished.  She dared not speak her wish to one whose remembered mastery in words forbade her poor speechlessness.  But God would hear her prayers for him.

Edward begged that he might come to her often, and she said,—­

“Come.”

He misinterpreted the readiness of the invitation.

When he had left her, he reflected on the absence of all endearing epithets in her speech, and missed them.  Having himself suffered, he required them.  For what had she wrestled so sharply with death, if not to fall upon his bosom and be his in a great outpouring of gladness?  In fact he craved the immediate reward for his public acknowledgement of his misdeeds.  He walked in this neighbourhood known by what he had done, and his desire was to take his wife away, never more to be seen there.  Following so deep a darkness, he wanted at least a cheerful dawn:  not one of a penitential grey—­not a hooded dawn, as if the paths of life were to be under cloistral arches.  And he wanted a rose of womanhood in his hand like that he had parted with, and to recover which he had endured every earthly mortification, even to absolute abasement.  The frail bent lily seemed a stranger to him.