The darkness is an advantage in many an interview like this. It prevented him from seeing all that was in Lady Car’s face, the impetuous terrible question, the impulse of wild scepticism and unbelief, the intolerable impatience of the idealist not to be altogether restrained. Her eyes asked what her lips could never say. Why did you leave me to be another man’s wife? Why let me be strained, humbled, trodden under foot? Why expose me to all the degradations which nobody could impose on you--and why, why? But Carry said none of these things. She could not. There are some things which the religion of the heart forbids ever to be put in words. She could not say them. He might have read them in her eyes, but the darkness kept that revelation from him which would have been more startling than anything Beaufort had ever encountered in his life. Finally Carry, being only a woman, and a sensitive and delicate one, fell into the universal feminine anti-climax, the foolishness of tears. How often does their irrestrainable _non-sequitur_ put the deepest reasons out of court, and turn the most solemn burden of the soul into apparent foolishness--a woman’s tears, which often gain a foolish cause, but as often lose a strong one, reducing the deep-hearted to the level of the shallow, and placing the greatest offender in the delightful superior position of the man who makes allowances for and pardons! Beaufort gathered her into his arms, made her have her cry out upon his shoulder, soothed and calmed and caressed her out of her passion of feeling. If any one could have whispered in his ear what was in the passionate heart that throbbed on his shoulder! but he would have smiled and would not have believed. She was a little enthusiast, still the same young ethereal poet as ever, a creature made up of lovely impulses and sympathies and nerve and feelings--his sweet Carry, his only love.