"If every lover talked as wildly—"
"If every lover loved as well. But there shall be no more rodomontade; I will be as solemn as you like. À propos to acting, have you ever seen Wilks as Sir Harry Wildair?"
"Twenty times. You know I have been surfeited with plays and operas; I am delighted to be free of them; the very squeaking of a fiddle jars my nerves. Let us talk of our own future. How I love this place of yours! Its quiet, its old-world air, exercise the most soothing influence upon me."
"It is not to be compared with Ringwood Abbey either for size or grandeur."
"Why do you name a place I abhor? why remind me of my late bondage?"
"Ah, love, to make liberty sweeter," he said tenderly, drawing her to his breast. They had reached the end of the walk, where there was a circular open summer-house—a shallow dome supported upon Corinthian pillars, on the model of a classic temple—and here they sat for a few minutes on a stone bench, Judith wrapped in her furs and oblivious of the December atmosphere; Lavendale glad to rest that weary heart of his, after half an hour's sauntering up and down. Here they were remote from the house and from all observation, and could abandon themselves to lovers' talk about the future.
Judith harped upon that future with a persistence which agonised her lover.
"I mean to take such care of you," she said; "I mean to coax back the healthy colour to those pale and haggard cheeks. I shall be your sick-nurse rather than your wife for the first year or so."
"You shall be my divinity always."
"Only when you have grown stout and strong, when you have expanded into a robust country squire like Bolingbroke, shall I be quite at ease about you. O Lavendale, how fiercely you have burnt the lamp of life!"