"The other day?" I answered. "It is fully three months ago, and I have not yet been able to reconcile my mind to the fact."
"It is a fact though, Ed," said Armitage; "and greatly as I deplored the calamity when it happened four years ago, I must confess that Helen has changed for the better in the interval. You see, she was most irrepressible, some time since—before her conversion, as she calls it—doing every thing by fits and starts, and holding every one under the severest of despotisms; but I actually believe this little devotion she has, this habit of confessing, has toned her down and made her the rational creature we see her. That's how you account for the change, isn't it, coz?"
"Fred, you are unconscionable. Mr. Moray knows you as well as I do, no doubt, and weighs your veracity proportionately. You don't admire Shelley, Mr. Moray?" interrogatively, as I turned over the pages of a richly bound edition of that author which lay upon a little table near me.
"No; and yet I do not look at him from the same point of view as you probably would. I think he was crazy. You, I suppose, would pass a more merciless judgment."
"Let us be charitable," she said, "and hope that he was insane. But unhappily his was a species of insanity of which there are but too many instances."
After that, the talk fell upon books generally. The hours slipped by, and eleven o'clock had struck before we took leave. Before I left her that night, I had thrown down the barriers crumbling so long; I had seen and recognized a true, womanly woman, and, all unknown to her, had accepted what I knew to be the inevitable.
After this I went often to the enchanted castle. My fairy princess was nearly always accessible, but so she was to the rest of the world as well. How could I hope to be the favored knight, when her smiles were bestowed on all so generously? She was invariably kind and cordial; sometimes slightly sarcastic and critical, but never moody or sad. I often wondered from what source she drew her abundant cheerfulness, and how she managed to preserve it.
Never by word or look had I intimated my own feelings toward her; something told me to linger at the gate of paradise, content to see the roses blooming without daring to venture in. I felt that a suspicion once aroused in her mind would change our relations completely; and I had not begun to hope.
As things stood, we grew to be excellent friends. Our views differed widely on many points, but religion was the only really sensitive topic. More than once I had noticed a look of pain in her face when I startled her with some of my materialistic views, and at last we tacitly avoided the subject altogether. While I admired her beautiful simplicity and faith, I could not understand then, as I do now, how any aspersion cast upon that faith could wound her as deeply as though it sought herself, and I had never wished to take it from her. In hopeful moments, few and far between, when I had dared to think of her as my wife, the thought of her religion and the absence of it in me had, strangely enough, never intruded itself upon me. Consequently, it was from no desire to weaken or alter her convictions in any particular that I became almost involuntarily instrumental in bringing matters to a crisis.