The confidence of love soon grows. When Leam came back to the seat under the cut-leaved hornbeam, where Edgar still waited for her to have the pleasure of watching her approach, she was not so much ashamed and oppressed as when he had first found her there. She did not want to run away, and she was losing her fear of wrongdoing. She was beginning instead to feel that delightful sense of dependence on a strong man's love which--_pace_ the third sex born in these odd latter times--is the most exquisite sensation that a woman can know. She was no longer alone--no longer an alien imprisoned in family bonds, but, though one of a family, always an alien and imprisoned, never homed and united. Now she was Edgar's as she had been mamma's; and there was dawning on her the consciousness of the same oneness, the same intimate union of heart and life and love, as she had had with mamma. She belonged to him. He loved her, and she--yes, she knew now that she had always loved him, had always lived for him. He was the secret god whom she had carried about with her in her soul from the beginning--the predestined of her life, now for the first time recognized--the only man whom she could have ever loved. To her intense and single-hearted nature change or infidelity was an unimaginable crime, something impossible to conceive. Had she not met Edgar she would never have loved any one, she thought: having met him, it was impossible that she should not have loved him, the ideal to her as he was of all manly nobleness and grace, given to her to love by a Power higher than that of chance. She was dimly conscious of this deep sense of rest in her new-found joy as she came across the lawn in her pretty summer dress of pearly gray touched here and there with crimson--the loveliest creature to be seen for miles around. Her usually mournful face was brightened with an inner kind of bliss which, from the face of the Tragic Muse, made it the face of a youthful seraph serene and blessed; her smile was one of almost unearthly ecstasy, if it still retained that timid, tremulous, fleeting expression which was so beautiful to Edgar; her eyes, no longer sad and sorrowful, but dewy, tender, bashful, shone with the purity, the confidence, the self-abandonment of a young girl's first and happy love: every gesture, every line, seemed to have gained a greater grace and richness since yesterday; and as she came up to her lover, and laid her hand in his when he rose to meet her and looked for one shy instant into his eyes, then dropped her own in shame-faced tremor at what they had seen and told, he said again to himself that he had done well. If even she should call the hounds at a hunt-dinner _dogs_, and say that hunting was stupid and cruel, what might not be forgiven to Such beauty, such love as hers?