She looked at his averted face with a blank piteousness which revealed all her secret. She would not have had him see it for worlds, but it was a relief just for a moment to rest her features in the sad cast which the muscles had grown tired in repressing. The autumn scent rose stronger as the air grew damp, and he stood breathing it in, and apparently feeling its influence like some Delphian afflatus. "Is there anything, Mary,--is there anything so beautiful as that light of eternity that rests on the figures of memory? Who that has once felt it can care for the common daylight of the present any more, or take pleasure in its prosaic groups?" "You'll certainly catch cold standing in that wet grass; do come in and let me shut the blinds," she said, for she had found cheerful lamplight the best corrective for his vagaries. So he came in and sat in his special arm-chair, and they chatted about miscellaneous village topics for an hour. The standpoint from which they canvassed Plainfield people and things was a peculiarly outside one. Their circle of two was like a separate planet from which they observed the world. Their tone was like, and yet quite unlike, that in which a long-married couple discuss their acquaintances; for, while their intellectual intimacy was perfect, their air expressed a constant mutual deference and solicitude of approbation not to be confounded with the terrible familiarity of matrimony; and at the same time they constituted a self-sufficient circle, apart from the society around them, as man and wife cannot. Man and wife are so far merged as to feel themselves a unit over against society. They are too much identified to find in each other that sense of support and countenance which requires a feeling of the exteriority of our friend's life to our own. If these two should marry, they would shortly find themselves impelled to seek refuge in conventional relations with that society of which now they were calmly independent. At length Mr. Morgan rose and threw open the blinds. The radiance of the full harvest-moon so flooded the room that Miss Eood was fain to blow out the poor lamp for compassion. "Let us take a walk," he said. The streets were empty and still, and they walked in silence, spelled by the perfect beauty of the evening. The dense shadows of the elms lent a peculiarly rich effect to the occasional bars and patches of moonlight on the street floor; the white houses gleamed among their orchards; and here and there, between the dark tree-stems, there were glimpses of the shining surface of the broad outlying meadows, which looked like a surrounding sea.