stood, all in her fine garments, a fair, white, bridal-like vision--stood
and wept.

It is a law most absolute and inevitable that love, however great,
however small, never remains quite stationary; it must either diminish
or increase. When Christian awoke out of the stunned condition which
had been hers both before and after her marriage, she began to awake
also to the dawning consciousness of what real marriage ought to
be--the perfect, sacred union, so seldom realized or even sought for,
and yet none the less the right aim and just desire of every true man and
woman, which, when not attained, makes the life imperfect, and the
marriage, if not a sin, a terrible mistake.

"I have sinned! I have sinned!" was the perpetual cry of Christian's
heart, which she had thought was dead as a stone, and now discovered
to be a living, throbbing woman's heart, which needed its lord, was
ready to obey him, love and serve him, nay, fall down in the very dust
before him, if only he could be found! And she knew now--knew by
the agony of regret for all she had missed, that he never had been
found; that the slain love over which she had mourned had been a mere
fancy, not a vital human love at all.

Now her husband never kissed her that she would not have given
worlds to feel that his were the only lover's lips which had ever touched
hers; he never called her by one tender name that she did not shiver to
think she had ever heard it from any other man. There was coming into
her that sense of awed self-appropriation, that fierce revulsion from any
intrusion on the same, which comes into any woman's nature when
beginning to love as she is beloved. Christian did not as yet; but she
recognized her husband's love, and it penetrated with a strong