Chapter 6 - Page 2

about the girl he loved that he could not endure the thought of
bandying her name about in an angry discussion. Added to this fine sense
was an adoring love for his mother. She was in anxiety enough, and would
be, until she heard of her husband's safety; why, then, should he add
his anxiety to hers?

Yet he was not happy about Cornelia. Since that unfortunate morning at
Richmond Hill they had never met. If she saw him go up or down Maiden
Lane, she made no sign. Several times Arenta's face at her parlour
window had given him a passing hope; but Arenta's own love affairs were
just then at a very interesting point; and, besides, she regarded the
young Lieutenant's admiration for her friend as only one of his many
transient enthusiasms.

"If there was anything real in it," she reflected, "Cornelia would have
talked about him; and that she has never done." Then she began to
remember, with pride, the very sensible behaviour of her own lover. "My
Athanase," she reflected, "did not give me an hour's rest until we were
engaged. He insisted on talking to father about our marriage settlements
and our future--in fact, he made of love a thing possible and practical.
A lover like Joris Hyde is not, I think, very fortunate."

She did not understand that the quality of love in its finest revelation
desires, after its first sweet inception, a little period of withdrawal--
it wonders at its strange happiness--broods over it--is fearful of
disturbing emotions so exquisite--prefers the certainty of its delicious
suspense to a more definite understanding, and finds a keen strange
delight in its own poignant anxieties and hopes. These are the birth
pangs of an immortal love--of a love that knows within itself, that it
is born for Eternity, and need not to hurry the three-score-and-ten
years of time to a consummation.

Of such noble lineage was the love of Cornelia for Joris Hyde. His
gracious, beautiful youth, seemed a part of her own youth; his ardent,
tender glances had filled her heart with a sweet trouble that she did
not understand. It was the most natural thing in the world that she
should wish to be apart; that she should desire to brood over feelings
so strangely happy; and that in this very brooding they should grow to
the perfect stature of a luminous and unquenchable affection.

Joris was moved by a sentiment of the same kind, though in a lesser
degree. The masculine desire to obtain, and the delightful consciousness
that he possessed, at least, the tremendous advantage of asking for the
love he craved, roused him from the sweet torpor to which delicious,
dreamy love had inclined him.

"I have thought of Cornelia long enough," he said one