"You are taking as much trouble as though I were going to stay out for an hour!"
"Nothing. And if she did--what then? There, you can't feel the cold now."
She made no answer. In truth, he did not wait for it. Bending his own face on the one he held up, he left a kiss and a loving word upon it: "My dearest!" A long and passionate kiss, as it sounded in his wife's ear.
Lady Ellis, perhaps not prepared for so demonstrative a proceeding, spoke a rebuke. He only laughed. They moved away; he retaining his arm around her for a lingering moment, as though to keep the shawl in its place; and their voices were dropped again to a soft sweet whisper, that scarcely disturbed the stillness of the murky autumn night.
Very different from the tone of that wail--had any been near to note it--when Clara Lake left her hiding-place; a low wail, as of a breaking heart, that came forth and mingled with the inclement evening air.
Some writer has remarked--and I believe it was Bulwer Lytton, in his "Student"--that to the vulgar there is but one infidelity in love. It is perfectly true; but I think the word "vulgar" is there misplaced, unless we may apply it to all, whether inmates of the palace or the cottage, whose temperament is not of the ultra-refined. _Ultra_-refined, mind! they of the sensitive, proud, impassioned nature, whose inward life, its thoughts, its workings, can never be betrayed to the world, any more than they themselves can be understood by it. Alas for them! They are hardly fit to dwell on this earth, to do battle with its sins and its cares; for their spirit is more exalted than is well: it may be said, more etherealized. The gold too highly refined, remember, is not adapted for general use. That the broad, vulgar idea conveyed by the word infidelity, is not their infidelity, is very certain. It is the unfaithfulness of the spirit, the wandering of the heart's truth to another, that constitutes infidelity for them; and where such comes, it shatters the heart's life as effectually as a blast of lightning shatters the tree it falls on. _This_ was the infidelity that wrought the misery of Clara Lake: that other infidelity, whether it was or was not to have place in the future, she barely glanced at. Her husband's love had left her: it was given to another; and what mattered aught else? The world had closed to her; never again could she have, as it seemed, any place in it. Henceforth life would be a mockery.