Karen's joy was unshadowed. It made him think of primroses and crystal springs. She was not shy; he was shyer than she, made a little dumb, a little helpless, by his man's reverence, his man's awed sense of the beloved's dawn-like wonder. She was not changed; any change in Karen would come as quiet growth, not as transformation. Gregory's gladness had not this simplicity. It revealed to him a new world, a world newly beautiful but newly perilous, and a changed self,--the self of boyhood, renewed yet transformed, through whose joy ran the reactionary melancholy that, in a happiness attained, glances at fear, and at a climax of life, is aware of gulfs of sorrow as yet unsounded. More than his lover's passion was a tenderness for her and for her unquestioning acceptances that seemed near tears. Karen was in character so wrought and in nature so simple. Her subtleties were all objective, subtleties of sympathy, of recognition, of adaptation to the requirements of devoted action; her simplicity was that of a whole-heartedness unaware at high moments of all but the essential. She had to tell him fully, holding his hand and looking into his eyes, all about her side of it; what she had thought when she saw him at the concert--certain assumptions there gave Gregory his stir of uneasiness--"You were caring just as much as I was--in the same way--for her music"; what she had thought at Mrs. Forrester's, and at the railway station, and when the letters went on and on. She had of course seen what was coming that evening after they had been to the Lavington's; "When you didn't understand about me and Tante, you know; and I made you understand." And then he had made her understand how much he cared for her and she for him; only it had all come so quietly; "I did not think a great deal about it, or wonder; it sank into me--like stars one sees in a still lake, so that next day it was no surprise at all, when you told me; it was like looking up and seeing all the real stars in the sky. Afterwards it was dreadful for a little while, wasn't it?" Karen held his hand for a moment to her cheek. When all the past had been looked at together, Gregory asked her if she would not marry him quite soon; he hoped, indeed, that it might be within the month. "You see, why not?" he said. "I miss you so dreadfully and I can't be here; and why should you be? Let me come down and marry you in that nice little church on the other side of the village as soon as our banns can be called." But, for the first time, a slight anxiety showed in her eyes. "I miss you dreadfully, too," she said. "But you forget, Tante will not be back till July. We must wait for Tante, Gregory. We are in May now, it is not so far to July. You will not mind too much?"