“Yes, you are right, my own dear blessing! You are right, for I never should have known your full value but for the trial you have passed through. Yet not now only, but always have I loved you, dear wife. I denied it to myself—I denied it to others—but there it was, the perfect, vital love, as sure as fate. When I first saw you, Kate, I met in your face, your voice, your manner,—yes, in every look and tone and gesture, in your whole unity—something that I had vainly sought through life—something homogenial to my nature—something perfectly satisfying. You seemed, dear Kate, not so much a separate existence as the completion of my own. What did you say, Kate? Your voice, too, is ‘ever soft, gentle and low,’—but speak again dearest. It is something that my heart listens to hear.”
“I said that I, too, when we first met,” she hesitated, and her cheek crimsoned, but feeling that he listened breathless for her words, she continued,—“Well, only this: I felt as if I were wholly yours, Archer—I have felt so ever since.”
Again she paused from native bashfulness.
“Kiss me, Kate,—you never kissed me in your life.”
Blushing and timid as the girl that she was, she stooped and lightly touched his lips with hers. But laughing fondly he threw his arm around her, exclaiming—
“You child! you child! Married two years and cannot kiss me!” and pressed her to his bosom, for one instant, in a passionate embrace, that sent life and gladness through all her veins, and then he said, “I am not ill, Catherine. I have drawn health from your lips. See who is at the door, love.”
Kate went and admitted Frank, who came in accoutred for traveling.
“Ha! where now, Fairfax?” asked Clifton.
“For Richmond to-day.”
“No! You will not leave us so soon?”