I be there to keep it going? It's in my exile that
it may languish."

He went on with that fantasy, but at this point
Kate ceased to attend. He saw after a little that
she had been following some thought of her own,
and he had been feeling the growth of something
determinant even through the extravagance of
much of the pleasantry, the warm, transparent irony,
into which their livelier intimacy kept plunging like
a confident swimmer. Suddenly she said to him
with extraordinary beauty: " I engage myself to
you for ever."

The beauty was in everything, and he could have
separated nothing couldn't have thought of her
face as distinct from the whole joy. Yet her face
had a new light. " And I pledge you I call God
to witness! every spark of my faith; I give you
every drop of my life." That was all, for the mo
ment, but it was enough, and it was almost as quiet
as if it were nothing. They were in the open air,
in an alley of the Gardens; the great space, which
seemed to arch just then higher and spread wider
for them, threw them back into deep concentra
tion. They moved by a common instinct to a spot,
within sight, that struck them as fairly sequestered,
and there, before their time together was spent,
they had extorted from concentration every ad
vance it could make them. They had exchanged
vows and tokens, sealed their rich compact, solem
nized, so far as breathed words and murmured sounds

[[106]]

p105 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p106w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p107

v?