Clemence hesitated, hardly perceptibly. Hers was a nature to which trivial endearments came strangely, almost painfully. She had not yet learned to caress in play; and there was an innate, unconscious, personal dignity about her to which trivial self-abasement was unnatural. But almost before she was conscious of her reluctance there swept over her, like a great wave of hot sweetness, the remembrance that she was his wife! It was her duty to do as he wished. She came softly across the room, sat down on the stool he had drawn out, and laid her cheek against his arm. It was a trivial action, very quietly performed, but it was instinct with the beauty of absolute self-abnegation; and as if, as her physical presence touched him, something of her spirit touched him too, a sudden quiet fell upon the exultant, self-satisfied boy at whose feet she sat. Not for the first time, by any means, there stole over Julian a vague uneasiness; a vague realisation of something beyond his ken; something in the light of which he shrank, unaccountably, from himself. His hand closed round the woman’s hand lying in his with a touch very different from the boyish passion of his previous caresses, and for a moment he did not speak. Then he said slowly and in a low, dreamy voice: “Clemence, I can’t think why you should ever have loved me!” The hand in his thrilled slightly, and the head on his shoulder was just shaken. Clemence could not tell him why she loved him. The bald outline she could trace as most women can trace it. She could look back upon her first sense of reliance, her pity, her admiration, her sense of strange, delightful companionship; but the why and wherefore of it, the mystery which had given to this young man and no other the key of her soul, this was to her as a miracle; as, indeed, there is always something miraculous in it, even when it seems most natural. To account for love; to say that in this case it is natural, in this case it is unnatural; is to confess ignorance of the first great attribute of love--that it is supernatural and divine. There was another silence, a longer one this time, and the strange spell sank deeper into Julian’s spirit. He said nothing. It would have been a relief to him to speak; to reduce to words, or, indeed, to definite consciousness, the vague trouble that oppressed him; but its outlines were too large and too vague for him. It was in truth a sense of total moral insolvency, but he could not understand it as such, having no moral standpoint. Clemence neither moved nor spoke; her hand lay motionless in his; her cheek rested against him; her beautiful eyes looked straight before them with a dreamy, almost awestruck gaze. At last, with a desperate determination to thrust away so unusual an oppression, Julian moved slightly and began to talk. He wanted to get back his sense of superiority, and his voice accordingly took its most boyish and masterful tone.