She looked handsome enough for it, and so Cornelius told her. She laughed at us, and bade us mind our own business. More she did not say then, but it came out a few days later that Mr. Thornton had told her the sooner Cornelius and I were married, the better he would be pleased. As this was precisely the feeling of Cornelius and Kate, I yielded. We were married very quietly one sunny summer morning; then we bade Kate adieu for a fortnight, which we were to spend in Rock Cottage. It was her darling wish that we should go there, and we gratified her. I remember well how strangely I felt when we reached my old home, now ours. It was not a year since I had left it, but it seemed ages. Everywhere we found touching tokens of the recent presence of Kate, and of her thoughtful tenderness. The sun was setting; we watched it from the beach beneath the pine trees, and never--so at least it seemed to me, and it cannot have been a fancy of mine, for Cornelius said so too--never had the sun set more gloriously, or the sea looked more beautiful than on this the eve of our marriage day. As in the visions of olden prophets, the cloudless heavens before us seemed to open, revealing depths of blazing light with long golden rays that, as they departed from the sun, grew paler until they faded into the deep evening blue. From the cliff whence we looked down, we saw the heavy billows of the sea rolling away towards the far horizon, and touched with a changing light that seemed both alive and burning. The glowing heavens were still; the voice of the ocean was murmuring and low; the land breeze was silent, and thus, looking at the two vast solitudes of sea and sky, we forgot earth beneath and behind us, as we sometimes forget life in the contemplation of eternity. I do not think I ever felt existence less than I did then, though so near to him whom I yet loved with every faculty of my being. But there is in true happiness something sublime that raises the soul far beyond mortality. If I felt anything in that hour, it was that the glorious ideal world which lay before us was not more lovely or more ideal than the new world which I now entered; and where in this life and the next, I hoped to dwell for ever with Cornelius. For to those who love purely, love is its own world, its own solitude, its own new created Eden, green and pleasant where they abide, a new born Adam and Eve, without the temptation and the fall, their hearts filled with tenderness, their souls overflowing with adoration.