It was well for Rachel that, with all his faults, Roden Dalrymple was not the reprobate he was supposed to be, but a man of stainless honour, in whose keeping the welfare of an ignorant and imprudent girl was safe; for—from the day when she went into the conservatory with him in the first hours of their acquaintance, stranger as he was, and she the most modest of girls, simply because he asked her—she had laid herself, metaphorically, at his feet—too simple and single in all her aims and impulses not to love unreservedly when she began to love at all, too strong in her young enthusiasm for her own ideals to be hampered by doubts either of herself or him, too thoroughly natural and ingenuous to disguise her heart or to bend it to the yoke of conventional law and order.
Now she gave herself up at once, turning to meet his outstretched arms, lifting her face to his strong and eager kisses with a passionate responsiveness and abandonment that, while it infinitely quickened his love and gratitude, showed him plainly that all the responsibility of her future happiness would rest with him.
"Oh," she said, with a long sighing sob, "I have wanted you so!"
"Have you, indeed?" he replied, tightening his arms about her with a gesture that was more significant than speech. "My little love, you shall never want me any more, if I can help it."
These were the terms of their "initial marriage ceremony."
And it is just to Mr. Dalrymple to say that he not only never took the slightest advantage of the irregularities that she innocently allowed, but—at any rate, not until long afterwards—he never even saw them.
That they were candid and truthful in themselves and to one another was from the first the essential bond between them, otherwise unlike as they were; and to him the absence of the usual maidenly reticence and reluctance displayed on these occasions indicated, all circumstances considered, rather a finer delicacy of nature than the ordinary, and never the faintest suspicion that she held the treasures of love and womanhood cheaply, even for his sake.
Feeling no need of further explanation—understanding one another, by that subtle sense which defies analysis, that instinctive recognition of spiritual kinship which, in its early development, was to them what is called "love at first sight," but which had in it the germs of a true companionship and comradeship that might defy all the accidents of time and chance—they sat for a few blessed silent moments side by side, she with her young head leaning trustfully against his worn brown face, not wanting to speak, unwilling even to think of all the difficulties that lay in ambush around them, ready to break into this ineffable peace with the breaking of the silence; looking over a low window-sill before them into the quiet night, with grave and happy eyes—at Melbourne, lying in a glorified haze of twilight beneath them, and at the silver of the sea beyond.
