He did not wait.  He pressed her to his bosom.

“You are mine, my Clara—­utterly mine; every thought, every feeling.  We are one:  the world may do its worst.  I have been longing for you, looking forward.  You save me from a thousand vexations.  One is perpetually crossed.  That is all outside us.  We two!  With you I am secure!  Soon!  I could not tell you whether the world’s alive or dead.  My dearest!”

She came out of it with the sensations of the frightened child that has had its dip in sea-water, sharpened to think that after all it was not so severe a trial.  Such was her idea; and she said to herself immediately:  What am I that I should complain?  Two minutes earlier she would not have thought it; but humiliated pride falls lower than humbleness.

She did not blame him; she fell in her own esteem; less because she was the betrothed Clara Middleton, which was now palpable as a shot in the breast of a bird, than that she was a captured woman, of whom it is absolutely expected that she must submit, and when she would rather be gazing at flowers.  Clara had shame of her sex.  They cannot take a step without becoming bondwomen:  into what a slavery!  For herself, her trial was over, she thought.  As for herself, she merely complained of a prematureness and crudity best unanalyzed.  In truth, she could hardly be said to complain.  She did but criticize him and wonder that a man was unable to perceive, or was not arrested by perceiving, unwillingness, discordance, dull compliance; the bondwoman’s due instead of the bride’s consent.  Oh, sharp distinction, as between two spheres!

She meted him justice; she admitted that he had spoken in a lover-like tone.  Had it not been for the iteration of “the world”, she would not have objected critically to his words, though they were words of downright appropriation.  He had the right to use them, since she was to be married to him.  But if he had only waited before playing the privileged lover!

Sir Willoughby was enraptured with her.  Even so purely coldly, statue-like, Dian-like, would he have prescribed his bride’s reception of his caress.  The suffusion of crimson coming over her subsequently, showing her divinely feminine in reflective bashfulness, agreed with his highest definitions of female character.

“Let me conduct you to the garden, my love,” he said.

She replied:  “I think I would rather go to my room.”

“I will send you a wild-flower posy.”

“Flowers, no; I do not like them to be gathered.”

“I will wait for you on the lawn.”

“My head is rather heavy.”

His deep concern and tenderness brought him close.

She assured him sparklingly that she was well.  She was ready to accompany him to the garden and stroll over the park.

“Headache it is not,” she added.

But she had to pay the fee for inviting a solicitous accepted gentleman’s proximity.