Now I had not felt worried about these arrangements till that moment by the gate, but Michael’s _then_ unveiled my eyes. I understood all in a moment that here was the stark and awful tragedy of my life. The mountains were his honeymoon, the two young men—his bride. The cottage and the cliffs, the sea, the long journey?—less than the rust that never stained his ice-axe. His wife? Just a Cook’s tour (personally conducted) to his bride—his two young men—his mountains—his honeymoon—his Paradiso. But he learned there, by the gate, that an inferno comes for some before their paradiso. In a storm of indignation I declined to be his Cook’s tour! ’All is over, Captain Ellsley.’ ’No, it has not yet begun, Meg.’ ’Oh, Michael! Oh, _please_, Michael.’ ’And so do you think to-morrow you could bring yourself to kiss me of your own accord, just once, my darling?’ And now I am alone in my own little room for the last time, for by this hour to-morrow I shall have more ’experience,’ I shall be linked up with all the other wedded lovers of the world: Charles Kingsley and Fanny Grenfell, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, William Gladstone and Catherine Glynn! Oh! poor old Dante! Why wasn’t he content to love his Beatrice and not marry Gemma? But then the classics would have been the poorer. He might not have written his _Inferno_ or said:— ’My wife Of savage temper, more than aught beside Hath to this evil brought me.’ What? Oh, yes, I know he didn’t actually say it of himself, but his own domestic hearth suggested it. And, anyway, I will _not_ be reproved for ignorance of Dante by—the General Public. FIFTEEN MONTHS LATER ’But when I became mature, I put away childish things.’ *CHAPTER XII* At other times when I have settled down to write, the words have seemed to hurry from my brain so fast that my pen has had to race along to catch the thoughts before they passed into oblivion. But now—though the desire to write consumes me like a fire, the words come haltingly. I am afraid lest I should mar the beauty of _this_ thing I know about. For I have found in marriage the loveliest experience of all. For on my wedding day, when all the flowers and jewels and lace were laid aside, and all the good-byes said; the last kiss given to my father, and the farewells waved to all the loving village folk who were gathered at the gates to watch me go, I felt a little lonely, and wondered, as I drove away, if anywhere could ever be again so sweet as that old home. When the little journey to the coast was made, and the sun set in a glow of splendour in the sea, the quiet night came down and the stars hung softly like jewelled lamps about a purple sky. Out in the windless, magical sea-scented night my husband caught and kissed me suddenly,— ’You can’t send me away to-night, you little fluttering thing.’