"You and I are, as it were, waiting, and I should not wait if you were not with me."
"But I am with you, and always shall be. You are not afraid of my leaving you?"
"In the vulgar sense? Oh, no! Afraid of your going away and caring for some one else? Oh, no! That could not be."
"No, indeed. No, indeed."
"For I should call you back and show you my heart, and how could you leave me when you saw that there was nothing in all my heart but you? Your pity would not let you do that. You might take something else away, but you could not take away all that I had in my heart."
"You dreamer of holy dreams."
"It is by the firmness of the clasp of our hands we may know that we shall be together at the revelation. I think people coarsen their minds against love. I have heard that people think it is a sign of foolishness. But it can't be. Where, I think, the harm is that people harden their natures against it before it has time to become all--before it has time to spiritualize the soul. It seems to me that this love of one another that Christ taught is the beginning of being with God."
"Surely child, my child, my dear, you have come from some blessed place, you have come to us from some place that is better than this."
"No," she said softly. "No. There is no better place for me. I am where God placed me--in my husband's arms."
They had been married a couple of months, and it was June once more. Not a cloud had arisen between them for these two months, or during the months before. John Hanbury's mother said that Edith Grace had the same witchery in appearance as that village beauty of the days of George II., and that some quality of the blood which flowed in his veins made him succumb at once to her; for otherwise how could it be that he should almost immediately after parting from Dora Ashton fall helplessly in love with a girl so extraordinarily like Dora as Edith? How else could the fascination be accounted for?