stimulated them afresh. She seemed pre-occupied, and was unusually
silent during dinner; but her beauty was just that voluptuous beauty
which is loveliest in repose. I had never felt its influence so
powerful over me as I felt it then.

In the drawing-room, Margaret's manner grew more familiar, more
confident towards me than it had ever been before. She spoke to me in
warmer tones, looked at me with warmer looks. A hundred little
incidents marked our wedding-evening--trifles that love treasures
up--which still remain in my memory. One among them, at least, will
never depart from it: I first kissed her on that evening.

Mr. Sherwin had gone out of the room; Mrs. Sherwin was at the other
end of it, watering some plants at the window; Margaret, by her
father's desire, was showing me some rare prints. She handed me a
magnifying glass, through which I was to look at a particular part of
one of the engravings, that was considered a master-piece of delicate
workmanship. Instead of applying the magnifying test to the print, for
which I cared nothing, I laughingly applied it to Margaret's face. Her
lovely lustrous black eye seemed to flash into mine through the glass;
her warm, quick breathing played on my cheek--it was but for an
instant, and in that instant I kissed her for the first time. What
sensations the kiss gave me then!--what remembrances it has left me
now!

It was one more proof how tenderly, how purely I loved her, that,
before this time, I had feared to take the first love-privilege which
I had longed to assert, and might well have asserted, before. Men may
not understand this; women, I believe, will.