“It would not be a separation: we will write every day: my spirit shall be always with you, and sometimes you shall see me with your bodily eye. I will not be such a hypocrite as to pretend that I desire to wait so long myself, but as my marriage is to please myself, alone, I ought to consult my friends about the time of it.”
“Your friends will disapprove.”
“They will not greatly disapprove, dear Gilbert,” said she, earnestly kissing my hand; “they cannot, when they know you, or, if they could, they would not be true friends—I should not care for their estrangement. Now are you satisfied?” She looked up in my face with a smile of ineffable tenderness.
“Can I be otherwise, with your love? And you do love me, Helen?” said I, not doubting the fact, but wishing to hear it confirmed by her own acknowledgment.
“If you loved as I do,” she earnestly replied, “you would not have so nearly lost me—these scruples of false delicacy and pride would never thus have troubled you—you would have seen that the greatest worldly distinctions and discrepancies of rank, birth, and fortune are as dust in the balance compared with the unity of accordant thoughts and feelings, and truly loving, sympathising hearts and souls.”
“But this is too much happiness,” said I, embracing her again; “I have not deserved it, Helen—I dare not believe in such felicity: and the longer I have to wait, the greater will be my dread that something will intervene to snatch you from me—and think, a thousand things may happen in a year!—I shall be in one long fever of restless terror and impatience all the time. And besides, winter is such a dreary season.”
“I thought so too,” replied she gravely: “I would not be married in winter—in December, at least,” she added, with a shudder—for in that month had occurred both the ill-starred marriage that had bound her to her former husband, and the terrible death that released her—“and therefore I said another year, in spring.”
“Next spring?”
“No, no—next autumn, perhaps.”
“Summer, then?”