"You shall, if it pleases you, my darling," he answered.
She leaned over the side of the boat watching the water, drawing her hand through the clear stream.
"Happy," she repeated, rather to herself than to him; "I can safely say this, that I have had so much happiness since I have been here that if I were wretched all my life afterward I should still have had far more happiness than falls to the lot of many people."
She remembered those words in after years; and she owned to herself that they had been most perfectly true.
The few months passed at River View had been most perfectly happy—no shade of care had come over her, no doubt, no fear—nothing that chilled the warmth of her love, nothing that marred its perfect trust. In some lives there comes a pause of silent, intense bliss just before the storm, even as the wind rests before the hurricane.
"You make me very proud, Leone," said Lord Chandos, "when you tell me of your happiness; I can only say may it be like the light of heaven, eternal."
CHAPTER XIV.
"TRUE UNTIL DEATH."
For some long months that case stood on the records. Every paper in England had some mention of it; as a rule people laughed when they read anything about it. They said it was a case of Corydon and Phyllis, a dairy-maid's love, a farce, a piece of romantic nonsense on the part of a young nobleman who ought to know better. It created no sensation; the papers did not make much of it; they simply reported a petition on the part of the Right Honorable the Earl of Lanswell and Lucia, his wife, that the so-called marriage contracted by their son, Lancelot, Lord Chandos, should be set aside as illegal, on account of his being a minor, and having married without their consent.