And Godolphin covered those generous lips with the sweet kisses in which esteem begins to mingle with passion. What has the earth like that first fresh union of two hearts long separated, and now blended for ever? However close the sympathy between woman and her lover--however each thinks to have learned the other--what a world is there left un-learned, until marriage brings all those charming confidences, that holy and sweet intercourse, which leaves no separate interest, no undivided thought! But there is one thing that distinguishes the conversation of young married people from that of lovers on a less sacred footing--they talk of the future! Other lovers talk rather of the past; an uncertainty pervades their hereafter; they feel they recoil from, it; they are sensible that their plans are not one and indivisible. But married people are always laying out the “to come;” always talking over their plans: this often takes something away from the tenderness of affection, but how much it adds to its enjoyment! Seated by each other, and looking on the silver Arno, Godolphin and Constance, hand clasped in hand, surrendered themselves to the contemplation of their future happiness. “And what would be your favorite mode of life, dear Percy?” “Why, I have now no schemings left me, Constance. With you obtained, I have grown a dullard, and left off dreaming. But let me see, a house in England--you like England--some ten or twenty miles from the great Babel: books, pictures, statues, and old trees that shall put us in mind of our Norman fathers who planted them; above all, a noisy, clear sunny stream gliding amidst them--deer on the opposite bank, half hidden amongst the fern; and rooks overhead: a privilege for eccentricity that would allow one to be social or solitary as one pleased; and a house so full of guests, that to shun them all now and then would be no affront to one.” “Well,” said Constance, smiling, “go on.” “I have finished.” “Finished?” “Yes, my fair Insatiable! What more would you have?” “Why, this is but a country-life you have been talking of; very well in its way for three months in the year.” “Italy, then, for the other nine,” returned Godolphin. “Ah, Percy!--is pleasure, mere pleasure, vulgar pleasure,--to be really the sole end and aim of life?” “Assuredly.” “And action, enterprise--are these as nothing?” Godolphin was silent, but began absently to throw pebbles into the water. The action reminded Constance of the first time she had ever seen him among his ancestral groves; and she sighed as she now gazed on a brow from which the effeminacy and dreaming of his life had banished much of its early chivalric and earnest expression. CHAPTER XLVII. NEWS OF LUCILLA.