A feeling of happiness that was as a song of gratitude warmed her heart. She pillowed her face on his hand and lay still on the burning sand beside him, undisturbed by the hot sun which beat upon her body, upon her face; loving its warmth which was as the warmth in her heart, a flame that glowed and burned and did not consume. Hallam rolled over on his elbow and lay watching her in contemplative silence for a space. The feel of her cheek against his hand pleased him. Her face was flushed and happy, and the look in the soft eyes when they met his moved him to lean over her and kiss their long lashes. Laughing, she opened them wide and looked up at him. "Paul, heart of my heart!" she cried. "How you make me love you!" "Yes!" he said, and kissed her again. "I wonder whose love is the stronger--yours or mine?" "We cannot prove that," she said. "Time may," he replied. "The strength of love is tested by its endurance. A great love endures through everything for all time." "A great love!" she repeated, and brushed his hand caressingly with her cheek. "I never knew, until you taught me, how great love was." Book 3--CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO. Marriage, like every other relationship in life, becomes with time a matter of usage. One by one the demands which the ardour of passion exacts relax imperceptibly, and love finds its level on a practical basis of mutual interests in the common daily round. Hallam's marriage was a reversal of the usual order, in which generally it falls to the woman to adapt herself more or less to the altered conditions. In their case the change affected him more materially than it affected Esme: his life had become, as it were, uprooted, and the roots did not strike freely in new soil. The change was not agreeable to him; but his love for his wife was of a quality which helped him to endure with a certain dogged patience many things that formerly he would not have entertained for a moment. He suppressed his own inclinations: to a large extent he suppressed his feelings: mentally his life with her was a series of small deceptions, of pretences practised deliberately for the purpose of misleading her. He feared to disappoint her. His mind became a storehouse of reserved thoughts and inhibitions upon which he turned the key, locking its surprises against her.