In these social reunions I remained aloof from Lilian. I saw her courted
by the gay young admirers whom her beauty and her fortune drew around
her,--her soft face brightening in the exercise of the dance, which the
gravity of my profession rather than my years forbade to join; and her
laugh, so musically subdued, ravishing my ear and fretting my heart as if
the laugh were a mockery on my sombre self and my presumptuous dreams.
But no, suddenly, shyly, her eyes would steal away from those about her,
steal to the corner in which I sat, as if they missed me, and, meeting my
own gaze, their light softened before they turned away; and the colour on
her cheek would deepen, and to her lip there came a smile different from
the smile that it shed on others. And then--and then--all jealousy, all
sadness vanished, and I felt the glory which blends with the growing
belief that we are loved.

In that diviner epoch of man's mysterious passion, when ideas of
perfection and purity, vague and fugitive before, start forth and
concentre themselves round one virgin shape,--that rises out from the sea
of creation, welcomed by the Hours and adorned by the Graces,--how the
thought that this archetype of sweetness and beauty singles himself from
the millions, singles himself for her choice, ennobles and lifts up his
being! Though after-experience may rebuke the mortal's illusion, that
mistook for a daughter of Heaven a creature of clay like himself, yet for
a while the illusion has grandeur. Though it comes from the senses which
shall later oppress and profane it, the senses at first shrink into shade,
awed and hushed by the presence that charms them. All that is brightest
and best in the man has soared up like long-dormant instincts of Heaven,
to greet and to hallow what to him seems life's fairest dream of the
heavenly! Take the wings from the image of Love, and the god disappears
from the form!