Mr. Bennet made a special point of telling Arethusa good-night, and he bent lingeringly over her hand as he did so, in his own inimitable way of making it seem the very hardest parting he had ever had to make.
"I'm coming to see you some time, if I may," he said.
Her heart almost stopped beating at this. Then it raced on again to beat in quick, little jumps. She lifted young, frankly adoring eyes to the handsome man before her, and quite suddenly, without a word of real warning, Arethusa knew....
She had fallen in love!
But it was not as she had fallen in love with Elinor, and it was not such love as she gave Ross or Miss Asenath or even Timothy; for this was without doubt the Miracle she had read about so many times under the hollow tree in Miss Asenath's Woods. And it had come just as she had always dreamed it would come, with a Hand-clasp and a Glance.
The hand in Mr. Bennet's holding trembled and grew cold before Arethusa could withdraw it. Her misbehaving heart almost interfered with her breathing. But the world around them went on as casually unaware of the Miracle as if neither Arethusa nor Mr. Bennet existed, when it should surely have been hushed into a Startled Silence by What had happened.
All through that night, Arethusa wandered with a tall man of long-lashed hazel eyes of marvelous beauty, through a country which was a Country of Rare Delight, even if only a Country of Dreaming. And as they wandered, he bent his head again and again to whisper, in a deep drawling voice, Words which bore a remarkable resemblance to some of the lyrics of the early nineteenth-century poets, and the pages of conversation in Arethusa's much read romances.
What though the Gentleman of the Dream wore a modern suit of commonplace evening clothes, instead of Ruffles and a Velvet Coat and Satin Small-clothes? It did not prevent, in the Dream, his pressing his Hand to his Heart at moments when it was logical that he should have done so, nor did it rob his Voice of the Proper Passionate Inflection. Nor did it keep the cardiac region of the Arethusa of the Dream from fluttering in an altogether delightful way.
CHAPTER XVII