"I hope we shall have a long life together," said he, a bright gleam in his handsome eyes, "but it's certain, my own dear, that we'll never be engaged but once...."
Moved herself by the farewells, she teasingly reminded him of his one-time impatience to fly back to lights and home. But Canning, straining her to his heart, replied that home was where the heart is, and was admitted to have the best of the argument.
Carlisle's world had been knocked far out of its ordered orbit. Hugo Canning, possessed by her, was so towering a fact that it threw the whole horizon into a new perspective. Between this shining state and the winter of discontent, there was no imaginable connection. Cause and effect must turn a new page, life's continuity start afresh.
So it seemed, in love's first bloom. And yet, circumstances being as they were, it was hardly possible that Carlisle should at one stroke completely cut herself off from the past, as Florrie Willing constantly did, as the French people once did, by means of their well-known Revolution.
In Hugo's absence (full as the days were with questions of the trousseau, rendered doubly exciting by mamma's princely attitude toward expense), Carlisle began to recognize once more the landmarks of her former environment. Doubtless a certain period of emotional reaction was inevitable, and with it the reassociation of ideas began. Canning was away a solid month. One day soon after his return,--it was on a lovely afternoon in early May, as they were motoring homeward after four hours' delightful _tête-à-tête_ in Canning's own car,--Carlisle said to him:
"Oh, Hugo, what do you think I did while you were away? Subscribed a hundred dollars to a Settlement House! My own money, too,--not papa's at all!"
Hugo, whose intensity of interest in his betrothed seemed only to have increased during the days of absence, cried out at her munificence.
"So, you've money, in those terms--well!" said he. "Aren't you mortally afraid of being gobbled up by a fortune-hunter some fine day?"
"A _great_ many people have warned me about that--mentioning you specially, by the way. But I've always told them that you loved me for my fair face alone."
Canning made a lover's remark, a thoroughly satisfactory one.