But, for all that, she began to comprehend its mystic meaning, and to say to herself, with deep tenderness:
"It is what Eliot feels for me and I for him."
Yet this blind young lover-husband said to himself sometimes, discontentedly:
"She is very bright over other lessons, but very slow learning the one I am trying to teach her so patiently every day."
Every day she grew more beautiful and graceful under the clever tuition of Mrs. Wilson, who delighted in her task of forming the unformed girl. They spent happy hours over the piano together, patient ones over books and blackboards.
For several months she never even heard the words "A Little Nobody," under which she had chafed so often at Mme. Lorraine's. Life began to have a new, sweet meaning, whose key-note was love.
She was so sorry when Eliot went away with his friendly hand-clasp in the morning, so glad when he returned in the evening. Sometimes she said to herself that she would not have minded kissing him now, as Maud and Edith did every morning; but, since the day when she promised to marry him, and then rejected his kiss, he had never offered another.
"I should not care for a cold, duty kiss," he thought. "I will wait for her love and her kisses together."
In the meantime, he worked very hard at his literary duties, trying to double the moderate salary he had enjoyed before his marriage, that his sisters might not feel the change. The pony had been quite an extravagance, but he had heard her express a timid wish for one, and by some severe self-denial in the matter of coats and cigars, had managed to gratify her wish. But he did not chafe against the silent sacrifices he made for her sake. Each one only made the dark-eyed girl dearer to his heart, and the memory of that last day in madame's prison always made him shudder and long to clasp her passionately to his heart.
On his strong white arm there was a slight scar made by the wound of a pocket-knife. He often looked at it when alone, and said to himself: