Her pleasure became tinged with a faint uneasiness, for she wouldn't have thought, left to herself, that she had been giving him love. Pastors' wives didn't give love except to their pastors. Friendship, yes; she had given him warm friendship, and an abject admiration of his gifts, and pride, and gratefulness--oh, such pride and gratefulness--that he should like being with her and saying lovely things to her; but love? She had supposed love was reserved for lovers. Well, if he liked to call it love ... one must not be miss-ish it was very kind of him.... It was, also, more and more wonderful to her that she had been doing and being and giving all these things without knowing it. Her suddenly discovered accomplishments staggered her. "Is it possible," she thought with amazement, "that I'm _clever_?" And as if he had heard the word lovers in her mind he said it. "Other lovers," he said, "are engaged perpetually in sycophantic adaptations--" "In what?" She thought he had been going to say engaged to be married, for though she had known even at Redchester, in spite of the care taken to shut such knowledge out, that the world included wicked persons who loved without engagements or marriages, sometimes indeed even without having been properly introduced, persons who were afterwards punished by the correctly plighted by not being asked to tea, they were, the Bishop informed an anxious inquirer once when he had supposed her out of the room, in God's infinite mercy numerically negligible. But Ingram did not heed her. "Except us," he went on. "Us?" she echoed. Well, if one took the word in its widest sense. "We fit," he said. "We fit, and reflect each other. I in your heart, you in my heart, like two mirrors that hang opposite one another for ever." A doubt as to the expediency of so much talk of hearts and love crept into her mind, but she quieted it by remembering how much worse the Song of Solomon was--"And yet so respectable really," she said, continuing her thought aloud, "and all only about the Church." "What is so respectable? Come and sit on that seat by the bush covered with roses," he said. "Look--in this faint light they are as white and delicate as you." "The Song of Solomon. It--just happened to come into my head. Things do," she added, beginning to lay hold of the first words that occurred to her, no longer at her ease. She sat down on the edge of the seat where he put her. "It's stone," she said nervously, looking up at him, for he had taken a step back and was considering her, his head on one side. "Do you think it's good for us?" "You beautiful little thing," he murmured, considering her. "You exquisite little lover." Her hands gripped the edge of the seat more tightly. A sudden very definite longing for Robert seized her. "Oh, but--" she began, and faltered. She tried again. "It's so _kind_ of you, but--you know--but I don't think--" "What don't you think, my dear, my discoverer, my creator, my restorer--"