"I am so foolish--so very foolish; and you are so good to me--so unfailingly, unceasingly good. I try to be good too; I do indeed. Don't be angry with me." "Angry! My darling!" People may write sentiment by the page, or talk it by the hour, but there is something in real love which will neither be discussed nor described. Let us draw over it the holy veil of silence: these things ought to belong to two alone. Dr. Grey's wife knew how he loved her. And when he quitted her to order the carriage which was to take them to the grand dinner party, she stood, all in her fine garments, a fair, white, bridal-like vision--stood and wept. It is a law most absolute and inevitable that love, however great, however small, never remains quite stationary; it must either diminish or increase. When Christian awoke out of the stunned condition which had been hers both before and after her marriage, she began to awake also to the dawning consciousness of what real marriage ought to be--the perfect, sacred union, so seldom realized or even sought for, and yet none the less the right aim and just desire of every true man and woman, which, when not attained, makes the life imperfect, and the marriage, if not a sin, a terrible mistake. "I have sinned! I have sinned!" was the perpetual cry of Christian's heart, which she had thought was dead as a stone, and now discovered to be a living, throbbing woman's heart, which needed its lord, was ready to obey him, love and serve him, nay, fall down in the very dust before him, if only he could be found! And she knew now--knew by the agony of regret for all she had missed, that he never had been found; that the slain love over which she had mourned had been a mere fancy, not a vital human love at all. Now her husband never kissed her that she would not have given worlds to feel that his were the only lover's lips which had ever touched hers; he never called her by one tender name that she did not shiver to think she had ever heard it from any other man. There was coming into her that sense of awed self-appropriation, that fierce revulsion from any intrusion on the same, which comes into any woman's nature when beginning to love as she is beloved. Christian did not as yet; but she recognized her husband's love, and it penetrated with a strong sweetness to her inmost soul. Mingled with it was an acute pain, a profound regret, a sad humility. Not hers, alas! the joyful pride, the full content, of a heart which is conscious in its sweetest depths that it gives as much as it receives.