"The want of a church," she continued, "was a great drawback to Cliffegate. But I knew there was one at Cornpool. Yet the little cottage suited me so well, and the place was so secluded, I could not resist taking it."
"Then, Geraldine, we shall have to be married at Cornpool. And now, dearest, when?"
"When you wish, Arthur."
"I want to possess you, dearest. This life is so full of uncertainty that, now you have accepted me, I should not be happy until we are married. Will the end of the month be too soon?"
"Impatient Arthur!" she said, pressing my hand to her cheek.
CHAPTER VII.
We were married at the end of the month, and when I brought my beautiful bride back to Elmore Court, I thought myself the happiest man in the world. I had reason indeed to think so; for I had marked in Geraldine a depth and earnestness of passion which I felt time would deepen and make still more earnest. And yet what was there about her that forced me into light musings, of which I was hardly conscious of the tenor? Of course, I deemed her love genuine, and I knew afterwards that it was genuine. Yet there was about it a suggestion of oddness, a hint of some sombre presence, which my instincts surely felt, if my heart did not at first recognise.
But her beauty was of the radiant type that sheds a universal lustre on the character. It transfigured her in my eyes. It threw a veil of light over her nature, and hid from my sight those features which a lesser grace must have discovered. My love was apt to give names of its own to the qualities it detected. To me, there seemed no violation of reason in calling her artless, wayward, childlike. I found her capricious conversation fascinating, not perplexing. Her habit of breaking off in her grave speech to chase some irrelevant and simple fancy charmed me. Her composite character suggested the two extremes of womanly sense and childlike innocence, and her beauty filled with light the void that divided them. So that I took no notice of the want of those connecting links, those pauses and gradations of mind, which in reality are as needful to the intellectual character as the middle keys of an instrument are essential to its capacity for producing harmony.