Lydia was silent, but her look was enough to fill the pause richly. She was savoring to the full the joy of close community of spirit which had been so rare in her pleasant life of material comfort, and she was saying a humble prayer that she might be good enough to be worthy of it, that she might be wise enough to make it the daily and hourly atmosphere of her life with Paul. "What are you thinking about, darling?" asked the other. "I was thinking how lovely it's going to be to be really married and come to know each other well. We don't know each other at all yet, _really_, you know." Paul was brought up short, as so often with Lydia, by an odd, disconcerted feeling, half pleasure, half shock, from the discovery in her of pages that he had not read, germs of ideas that had not come from him. "Why, darling Lydia, what do you mean? We know each other through and through!" he now protested. It gave a tang of the unexpected to her uniform sweetness, this always having a corner still to turn which kept her out of his sight. Paul was used to seeing most women achieve this effect of uncertainty by the use of coquetry, and in the free-and-easy give and take between young America of both sexes, he had learned with a somewhat cynical shrewdness to discount it. He entered into the game, but, in his own phrase, he always knew what he was about. Lydia, on the contrary, often penetrated his armor by one of these shafts, barbed by her complete unconsciousness of any intent. He felt now, with a momentary anguish, that he could never be sure of her belonging quite to him until they were married, and cried out upon her idea almost angrily, "I don't know what you mean! We know each other now." "Oh, no, we don't," she insisted. "There are lots of queer fancies in me that you'll only find out by living with me--and, Oh, Paul! the fine, noble things I _feel_ in you! But I can see the whole of them only by seeing you day by day. And then there are lots of things that aren't in us, really, yet, but only planted. They'll grow--we'll grow--Paul, to-day is an epoch. We've passed a new milestone." "How do you mean?" he asked. "The way we've felt--the way we've talked--of real things--out there in our own--" She laughed a little, a serene murmur of drollery which came to her when she was at peace. "We've been engaged since November, but we only got engaged to be married to-day--just as our wedding's to be in June, but goodness knows when our marriage will be." Paul smiled at her tenderly. "If I'd known the date was so uncertain as that I shouldn't have dared to go so far in my house-building."