That innocent little question was a day gained.

One day of boating on the upper reaches of the pastoral river, and walks in woods and golden meadows, was felicity fallen on earth, the ripe fruit of dreams.  A dread surrounded it, as a belt, not shadowing the horizon; and she clasped it to her heart the more passionately, like a mother her rosy infant, which a dark world threatens and the universal fate.

Love, as it will be at her June of life, was teaching her to know the good and bad of herself.  Women, educated to embrace principles through their timidity and their pudency, discover, amazed, that these are not lasting qualities under love’s influence.  The blushes and the fears take flight.  The principles depend much on the beloved.  Is he a man whose contact with the world has given him understanding of life’s laws, and can hold him firm to the right course in the strain and whirling of a torrent, they cling to him, deeply they worship.  And if they tempt him, it is not advisedly done.  Nature and love are busy in conjunction.  The timidities and pudencies have flown; they may hover, they are not present.  You deplore it, you must not blame; you have educated them so.  Muscular principles are sown only out in the world; and, on the whole, with all their errors, the worldly men are the truest as well as the bravest of men.  Her faith in his guidance was equal to her dependence.  The retrospect of a recent journey told her how he had been tried.

She could gaze tenderly, betray her heart, and be certain of safety.  Can wine match that for joy?  She had no schemes, no hopes, but simply the desire to bestow, the capacity to believe.  Any wish to be enfolded by him was shapeless and unlighted, unborn; though now and again for some chance word or undefined thought she surprised the strange tenant of her breast at an incomprehensibly faster beat, and knew it for her own and not her own, the familiar the stranger—­an utter stranger, as one who had snared her in a wreath and was pulling her off her feet.

She was not so guileless at the thought of little Selina Collett here, and of Selina as the letter-bearer of old; and the marvel that Matey and Browny and Selina were together after all!  Was it not a kind of summons to her to call him Matey just once, only once, in play?  She burned and ached to do it.  She might have taxed her ingenuity successfully to induce little Selina to the boldness of calling him Matey—­and she then repeating it, as the woman who revived with a meditative effort recollections of the girl.  Ah, frightful hypocrite!  Thoughts of the pleasure of his name aloud on her lips in his hearing dissolved through her veins, and were met by Matthew Weyburn’s open face, before which hypocrisy stood rent and stripped.  She preferred the calmer, the truer pleasure of seeing him modestly take lessons in the nomenclature of weeds, herbs, grasses, by hedge and ditch.  Selina could instruct him as well in entomology, but he knew better the Swiss, Tyrolese, and Italian valley-homes of beetle and butterfly species.  Their simple talk was a cool zephyr fanning Aminta.