She had tried to make him divine all this in the chariness of her promise to write.  She would write; of course she would.  Buthe would be busy, preoccupied, on the move:  it was for him to lether know when he wished a word, to spare her the embarrassment ofill-timed intrusions.

“Intrusions?” He had smiled the word away.  “You can’t wellintrude, my darling, on a heart where you’re already established, to the complete exclusion of other lodgers.”  And then, taking her hands, and looking up from them into her happy, dizzy eyes:  “You don’t know much about being in love, do you, Lizzie?” he laughingly ended.

It seemed easy enough to reject this imputation in a kiss; but she wondered afterward if she had not deserved it.  Was she really cold and conventional, and did other women give more richly and recklessly?  She found that it was possible to turn about every one of her reserves and delicacies so that they looked like selfish scruples and petty pruderies, and at this game she came in time to exhaust all the resources of an over-abundant casuistry.

Meanwhile the first days after Deering’s departure wore a soft, refracted light like the radiance lingering after sunset. He, at any rate, was taxable with no reserves, nocalculations, and his letters of farewell, from train and steamer, filled her with long murmurs and echoes of his presence.  How he loved her, how he loved her—­and how he knew how to tell her so!

She was not sure of possessing the same aptitude.  Unused tothe expression of personal emotion, she fluctuated between the impulse to pour out all she felt and the fear lest her extravagance should amuse or even bore him.  She never lost the sense that what was to her the central crisis of experience must be a mere episode in a life so predestined as his to romantic accidents.  All that she felt and said would be subjected to the test of comparison with what others had already given him:  from all quarters of the globeshe saw passionate missives winging their way toward Deering, forwhom her poor little swallow-flight ofdevotion could certainly not make a summer.  But such moments were succeeded by others in which she raised her head and dared inwardly to affirm her conviction that no woman had ever loved him just as she had, and that none, therefore, had probably found just such things to say to him.  And this conviction strengthened the other less solidly based belief that he also, for the same reason, had found new accents to express his tenderness, and that the three letters she wore all day in her shabby blouse, and hid all night beneath her pillow, surpassed not only in beauty, but in quality, all he had ever penned for other eyes.