Page:The Clergyman's Wife.djvu/304

 She turns to her letters and musingly loosens the string that bound them, and lets them drop upon her knees. Though they are but "dead paper, mute and white," to her they seem "alive and quivering" against her tremulous hands. She tenderly reminds him what this said, and what that; a simple thing, and yet it made her weep. And she tells him how she "sank and quailed" when she read the one which held those words, "Dear, I love thee!" and how the ink of another had paled by lying upon her fast-beating heart.

Then, with that vague sense of fear which every woman feels at the contemplation of yielding up all for one, she asks him, solemnly:

With reverent words, almost with holy awe, she dwells upon the memory of his first kisses.