Agatha recoiled, while the angry blood flashed from brow to throat. Her lover saw it, and for the moment a strange intentness was in his gaze. But immediately he smiled, as a man would at some horrible phantom of his own creating, and continued with a softened manner:
“Or, if our own wills hold secure, many things may happen, as Anne Valery forewarned us, to prevent our union. Even ere a month or two—for if you are ever mine it must be as soon as then—but even within that time one or other of us may have gone away where no loving, no regretting, can ever call us back any more.”
Terrible was the imagined solitude of a world from which had passed the only being who cherished her—the only being whom she thoroughly honoured. Agatha drew closer to Nathanael.
“Still, for all that,” continued he, striving to keep even in his mind the balance of honour and generous tenderness against the arguments of selfish passion, “if for any reason you wish to postpone this day for weeks, months, or years, I will take the chance. All shall be as you deem best for your own happiness. As for mine—I will try to be content.”
He paused a little, but it was a pause which no woman could misunderstand. Then, turning back to her, he said in a low tone,
“When am I to go away, Agatha?”
Her brow dropped slowly against his arm, as, much agitated, yet not unhappy, she whispered the one word “Never.”
For one moment Agatha felt against her own the loud convulsive throbs of the heart that loved her—an embrace which, in its fierce rapture, was like none that came before it, or after. When she learned to count and chronicle such tokens of love, as one begins to count each wave when the sand grows dry, this embrace remained to her as a truth, a reality, which no succeeding doubts could explain away or gainsay.
It lasted, as such moments can but last, a space too brief to be reckoned, dying out of its own intensity. Agatha slid from her lover's arms, and swiftly passing out at the door, met Emma coming in. The unlucky bridegroom was left to make his own explanation to Mrs. Thornycroft, and how he performed that feat remains a mystery to this day.
Solemnly, and much affected, the bride went up-stairs to put on her wedding-garments.