Phyllida was mine now! Phyllida was mine now! Daintily I lifted her hand to my arm, and with the echo of the vicar’s shrewish congratulations ringing in our ears we moved into the mid-day sunlight, and began to walk towards Colmer. ‘You are my wife,’ I said. ‘Mistress Drassington, we are out of everybody’s sight--these trees will hide us--you need have no shame in kissing me here.’ She made no reply: I turned towards her, imagining that she was wrought beyond speech. We had reached the Syne Marie Wood, where the great conifers screened off the sun. But one dusky shaft crowned Phyllida, and sliding from her head struck her fingers and danced there. Her face was set, her eyelids had fallen. ‘Tell me, love,’ I murmured. ‘Let me help you: you know you are mine now. One kiss, just one, my meed if I have ever given you an instant’s happiness.’ Neither word nor movement responded. She was impenetrably silent: her flame-coloured gown became a barrier of defence: I dared not touch her. ‘Phyllida,’ I entreated. ‘My wife!’ Those woebegone eyes were raised slowly. ‘Wife,’ she said, like one in a dream, ‘I am no wife. I am true, true as Heaven itself. Do not write again, I will be true.’ Suddenly her face changed terribly, and she drew herself to her full height. ‘For God’s sake, Rupert Drassington!’ she cried, ‘for God’s sake tell me that it is not so!’ ‘What, dearest?’ I said. ‘My terror--that we are man and wife.’ ‘I am yours and you are mine--my wife--my wife.’ And my tongue dwelt on the words with delight. But Phyllida left my side, and, sitting on the trunk of a newly-felled tree, wept as her poor heart would break. PART III THE MARRIAGE NIGHT A dull fear troubled me from the moment when Phyllida, with many piteous words, begged me to leave her to herself until evening. Her face was averted all the time, although I strove to make her look at mine, in the belief that my agony at this phase might excite her pity and compel the confidence she withheld. Assured that she loved me with all her soul, I had no distrust of her. Phyllida was the perfection of purity; in what I knew of her past she had shone with a splendid chasteness, and not a breath had sullied her repute. The curious letters she had read the night before told of nothing but the holiest love, and the insinuation concerning an influence that would prevail was nothing more than a poet’s fancy. I had conceived many such: in my story of _Hope Deferred_ Michael strives to bind Mary so, and despite her fears of being his bond-maid for ever, at the dawn of a stronger passion, a stretching of the limbs, a higher inspiration breaks lightly asunder the shrivelled withes, and Michael becomes a memory and no more.