“Are you sure? They say if you can love you can be jealous,” he said, bending his head on one side and searching her eyes. “I am sure. Jealousy implies anger with the loved one, or hatred of the rival. I could never feel either. I could only suffer;” and with a deep, long sigh, she laid her head back upon his shoulder. Presently raising it, she continued, “You said you learned abroad the meaning of the term ‘illusions,’ as applied to love. Except you, my father is the only person whom I ever heard use it in the same sense. There is no word that can supply its place. It implies the distinction between the love of lovers and all other kinds of love, and more than that, it implies all that is divine in loving. I think it hard to preserve these precious illusions, but without them love would have no charm for me. I should become a wretched wife.” “But we will not lose our illusions, precious. What should come between us? Are we not irrevocably bound to each other by the very act of marriage?” “No,” Clara said decidedly and with emotion. “We are only bound by those very illusions. The divine spirit of Love makes and justifies marriage. The body is nothing to me, when the soul is gone. You are a very elegant man, Albert—elegant and beautiful in all eyes, but in mine you are beauty and strength and tenderness in one. You are everything to me; but your dear eyes, your lips, your eloquent tongue, would lose all their charm, with the loss of the soul of all.” “Why, child, you are trembling like a leaf. Are you quite well?” “Albert, why did she look flushed?” and she looked appealingly, searchingly into his eyes. “I—I believe you are jealous after all,” he said. Clara turned slowly and left the room without a word. “Jealous, by Jove!” he said to himself when she was gone, and the idea flattered his vanity as it would that of the commonest soul. Clara had told him she could not be jealous, as the word is generally understood. That she could only suffer; but the words meant little to him. She had spoken the exact truth. In her venture, she had staked everything, and believed, as all women do under the same circumstances, that notwithstanding the coldness and indifference of married people, visible everywhere to the most superficial observer, that it was the result of a lack of wisdom—that love in all its divine freshness, could be preserved. Albert had held the same opinion, and had often said the danger lay in the first withholding of perfect trust. “Love should be cultivated like the most tender plant,” he had said. He mused over the matter for a half hour, and then went to Clara’s room, where he found her, not “drowned in tears,” as he had anticipated, but very calmly dressing for dinner.