"Perhaps not in one sense," he answered. "A great many people are carried along by their impulses, their transitory emotions, which are not, properly speaking, feelings at all. They make what some one calls the 'fatal error of mistaking the eddy for the current.' But among educated people it seems to me that we think too much, especially of our own thoughts, and feel too little. All this year I have not said that I loved you; I don't know that I have thought it, but I have felt and lived it. Sometimes I have not been thoughtful—"
"You have always been too thoughtful," she interrupted.
"No, but when I have been inconsiderate it was because you were myself, the best self that we overlook sometimes, but return to with unfailing loyalty. You were not bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; that is a very low and material view of what you have been and are to me, heart of my heart and soul of my soul. I cannot think of a life apart from you, for you are my life. Marriage is not a matter of a license and a ceremony and Mendelssohn and gaping crowds and a tour. We do not need any one to tell us that what God has joined cannot be sundered by man. All this year has been a long wedding of every thought and feeling and desire, until I have looked into your eyes to see my own wish. We have thought and thought, but that way madness lies. Now I feel that all the world we have lost, lives for us in every glorious possibility in each other. For I know that you love me."
"Yes," she said, "I think I have loved you all along, but it never entered my dreams that you could love me. Even now, when you tell me, it does not seem as if it could be so, either by the mental process, or by that of feeling."
He caught her in his arms and kissed her, a kiss so long and tender that it left her clinging to him, breathless and half awakened.
"Don't think," he said, "feel,—feel my heart and know that every beat is for you, that every atom of me calls for you, and every drop of blood obeys, as it would command you. I have tried to reach the ideal of the love that says, not 'thou must be mine,' but 'I must be thine,' but I have failed if you can doubt me."
She flung her arms around his neck with sudden passion.
"This is the greatest, the most perfect dream of all," she said; "I think it must be heaven."
"A new heaven and a new earth," he answered gently.