"I want you there, by my side, to help me make a real human home around which other homes may grow. There ought to be a heart in it, and I cannot do it alone. Could you—will you—come? Will you be to me the one woman of the world, and out of your purity and strength help me to help your sisters?"
He had risen and walked the few steps across the distance that was between them. He stopped before her, and bending toward her, held out his hands.
Desire stood up and laid hers in them.
"It must be right. You have come for me. I cannot possibly do otherwise than this."
The deep, gracious, divine fact had asserted itself. A house here, or a house there could not change or bind it. They belonged together. There was a new love in the world, and the world would have to arrange itself around it. Around it and the Will that it was to be wedded to do.
They stood together, hands in hands. Christopher Kirkbright leaned over and laid his lips against her forehead.
He whispered her name, set in other syllables that were only for him to say to her. I shall not say them over on this page to you.
But there is a line in the blessed Scripture that we all know, and God had fulfilled it to his heart.
Strangely—more strangely than any story can contrive—are the happenings of life put side by side.
As they sat there a little longer in the quiet library, forgetting the late evening hour, because it was morning all at once to them; forgetting Sylvie Argenter and her mother as they were at just this moment in the next room; only remembering them among those whom this new relation and joining of purpose must make surer and safer, not less carefully provided for in the changes that would occur,—the door of the gray parlor opened; a quick step fell along the passage, and Sylvie unlatched the library door, and stood in the entrance wide-eyed and pale.