“Not be happy, and with you? Sceptic, by what reasoning do you arrive at that ungracious conclusion?” “The heart loves repose and the soul contemplation, but the mind needs action. Is it not so?” “Where learned you that aphorism, out of place on such rosy lips?” “I learned it in studying you,” murmured Lilian, tenderly. Here Mrs. Ashleigh joined us. For the first time I slept under the same roof as Lilian. And I forgot that the universe contained an enigma to solve or an enemy to fear. CHAPTER LXI. Twenty days--the happiest my life had ever known--thus glided on. Apart from the charm which love bestows on the beloved, there was that in Lilian’s conversation which made her a delightful companion. Whether it was that, in this pause from the toils of my career, my mind could more pliantly supple itself to her graceful imagination, or that her imagination was less vague and dreamy amidst those rural scenes, which realized in their loveliness and grandeur its long-conceived ideals, than it had been in the petty garden-ground neighboured by the stir and hubbub of the busy town,--in much that I had once slighted or contemned as the vagaries of undisciplined fancy, I now recognized the sparkle and play of an intuitive genius, lighting up many a depth obscure to instructed thought. It is with some characters as with the subtler and more ethereal order of poets,--to appreciate them we must suspend the course of artificial life; in the city we call them dreamers, on the mountain-top we find them interpreters. In Lilian, the sympathy with Nature was not, as in Margrave, from the joyous sense of Nature’s lavish vitality; it was refined into exquisite perception of the diviner spirit by which that vitality is informed. Thus, like the artist, from outward forms of beauty she drew forth the covert types, lending to things the most familiar exquisite meanings unconceived before. For it is truly said by a wise critic of old, that “the attribute of Art is to suggest infinitely more than it expresses;” and such suggestions, passing from the artist’s innermost thought into the mind that receives them, open on and on into the Infinite of Ideas, as a moonlit wave struck by a passing oar impels wave upon wave along one track of light. So the days glided by, and brought the eve of our bridal morn. It had been settled that, after the ceremony (which was to be performed by license in the village church, at no great distance, which adjoined my paternal home, now passed away to strangers), we should make a short excursion into Scotland, leaving Mrs. Ashleigh to await our return at the little inn.