affectation of silly-sweet languishing, none of the weaknesses of
woman. And so exquisitely fresh in her twenty years of
maidenhood, with bright young eyes that seemed to bid defiance to
all the years to come.

He went about like one dazzled with excessive light. He talked as
he had never talked before, recklessly, exultantly, insolently--
in the nobler sense. He made friends on every hand; he welcomed
all the world to his bosom; he felt the benevolence of a god.

'I love you!' It breathed like music at his ears when he fell
asleep in weariness of joy; it awakened him on the morrow as with
a glorious ringing summons to renewed life.

Delay? Why should there be delay? Amy wished nothing but to
become his wife. Idle to think of his doing any more work until
he sat down in the home of which she was mistress. His brain
burned with visions of the books he would henceforth write, but
his hand was incapable of anything but a love-letter. And what
letters! Reardon never published anything equal to those. 'I have
received your poem,' Amy replied to one of them. And she was
right; not a letter, but a poem he had sent her, with every word
on fire.

The hours of talk! It enraptured him to find how much she had
read, and with what clearness of understanding. Latin and Greek,
no. Ah! but she should learn them both, that there might be
nothing wanting in the communion between his thought and hers.
For he loved the old writers with all his heart; they had been
such strength to him in his days of misery.