The optimism of such a hope can only be accounted for by his absolute ignorance of women; but her shyness, in a situation so strange to her, seemed to justify it while he remained at Wallingford.
But later, as her letters began to multiply, he realized how profound was his mistake. She rode her fancy wherever it led her, and he might as well have tried to fix a frontier for the north wind.
She wrote persistently of his love, of its greatness, its gladness, its splendid illumination of her life.
Her exultation in a thing which had no real existence was terrible to Terence.
Her dull unhappy being was transformed by a miracle as wonderful as that which creates the glory of painted wings from a withered chrysalis.
And he had wrought it. He, by some ignorant magic, had set her life afloat on pinions frailer and more resplendent than a butterfly's, to touch which roughly was to destroy her.
That was, of course, too brutal to be thought of. He must accept what he had done, however little he had meant to do it; must trust to time to dull its marvel and bring the woman back to earth.
But there seemed little likelihood of that at first, and with the increasing rapture of her letters Terence grew ever more dismayed.
Yet if he tried to lure her down to sanity, an agonized reply would be flung at him by the post's return, only to make his fears more vivid, and to compel from him, in sheer abasement, an expression of sentiment which he not only did not possess, but would have shrunk from possessing.
"Swear," she had written, not once, nor twice; "swear that you love no other woman; that you have never loved another woman; that I fill all your thoughts!"