Greater than all or anything was the large and lustrous happiness of the wedded lovers. The deep change that had come upon their lives gave them a new and statelier beauty. So might have looked the beautiful and tall Sir Walter, and so the fair Elizabeth Throgmorton, his bright Elizabethan flower of wifely womanhood, in their happiest hour of wedded love. At home in Temple street the day after their wedding, in the new and fresh enjoyment of a marriage whose perfect nobleness might have gladdened the pure soul of Swedenborg, they laid their little plans for the future. It was first agreed that Harrington should permit himself a vacation, free from the toil of study, in this the golden crescent of their eternal honeymoon. It was next resolved that Harrington should keep his house in Chambers street, and live there when he so chose. Both he and Muriel thought that married people are too intimate with each other, see too much of each other, push too far and frequently into the sacred privacy which Nature sets around the individual soul, and so lose the charm of freshness which is at once the crowning delight and most potent safeguard of love. If, in married life, they thought, familiarity does not breed contempt, it commonly breeds a sort of humdrum unappreciating indifference which makes the wedded lovers seem less beautiful and noble to each other than in the matin prime of their early passion. And as Muriel and Harrington designed to be lovers forevermore, they resolved to maintain the relations which make love ever magical and ever new. Counting himself fortunate, therefore, that he had a house of his own to retire to in those golden-valleyed intervals which Nature prescribes to checquer and enhance the tender and holy beauty of the mountain land of love, and sadly wishing that his fortune might be shared by all, as it might in a nobler order of society, Harrington agreed with Muriel, and she with him, to use their new freedom of intercourse wisely, he spending his studious days as heretofore in his own house, she passing her happy life as in her maidenhood in hers, both coming together whenever their souls drew, or their duties bade, freely, attractively, in mutual ministration and communion, living for each other and for the world’s great family of souls. The next thing that came under discussion was a proposition from Muriel to settle half her fortune on her husband, which Harrington would not listen to on any condition. It was finally compromised, amidst much gaiety, by his agreeing to let no want of his go untold, and to always accept from her whatever money he needed, instead of interrupting his studies with compositions to supply his deficiencies. Which bargain Muriel closed with a frolic threat of banishment from her presence if she ever discovered him infringing the terms of the compact, until he made atonement by accepting a double sum for his disobedience.