“My vows at the altar must suffice.”

“You will not?  Clara!”

“I am plighted to you.”

“Not a word?—­a simple promise?  But you love me?”

“I have given you the best proof of it that I can.”

“Consider how utterly I place confidence in you.”

“I hope it is well placed.”

“I could kneel to you, to worship you, if you would, Clara!”

“Kneel to Heaven, not to me, Willoughby.  I am—­I wish I were able to tell what I am.  I may be inconstant; I do not know myself.  Think; question yourself whether I am really the person you should marry.  Your wife should have great qualities of mind and soul.  I will consent to hear that I do not possess them, and abide by the verdict.”

“You do; you do possess them!” Willoughby cried.  “When you know better what the world is, you will understand my anxiety.  Alive, I am strong to shield you from it; dead, helpless—­that is all.  You would be clad in mail, steel-proof, inviolable, if you would . . .  But try to enter into my mind; think with me, feel with me.  When you have once comprehended the intensity of the love of a man like me, you will not require asking.  It is the difference of the elect and the vulgar; of the ideal of love from the coupling of the herds.  We will let it drop.  At least, I have your hand.  As long as I live I have your hand.  Ought I not to be satisfied?  I am; only I see further than most men, and feel more deeply.  And now I must ride to my mother’s bedside.  She dies Lady Patterne!  It might have been that she . . .  But she is a woman of women!  With a father-in-law!  Just heaven!  Could I have stood by her then with the same feelings of reverence?  A very little, my love, and everything gained for us by civilization crumbles; we fall back to the first mortar-bowl we were bruised and stirred in.  My thoughts, when I take my stand to watch by her, come to this conclusion, that, especially in women, distinction is the thing to be aimed at.  Otherwise we are a weltering human mass.  Women must teach us to venerate them, or we may as well be bleating and barking and bellowing.  So, now enough.  You have but to think a little.  I must be off.  It may have happened during my absence.  I will write.  I shall hear from you?  Come and see me mount Black Norman.  My respects to your father.  I have no time to pay them in person.  One!”

He took the one—­love’s mystical number—­from which commonly spring multitudes; but, on the present occasion, it was a single one, and cold.  She watched him riding away on his gallant horse, as handsome a cavalier as the world could show, and the contrast of his recent language and his fine figure was a riddle that froze her blood.  Speech so foreign to her ears, unnatural in tone, unmanlike even for a lover (who is allowed a softer dialect), set her vainly sounding for the source and drift of it.  She was glad of not having to encounter eyes like Mr. Vernon Whitford’s.