For the present it was a pleasant enough world to them. Surrey had a
lovely little place on the Hudson to which he would carry her, and
pleased himself by fitting it up with every convenience and beauty that
taste could devise and wealth supply.
How happy they were there! To be sure, nobody came to see them, but then
they wished to see nobody; so every one was well satisfied. The
delicious lovers' life of two years before was renewed, but with how
much richer and deeper delights and blissfulness! They galloped on many
a pleasant morning across miles and miles of country, down rocky slopes,
and through wild and romantic glens. They drove lazily, on summer noons,
through leafy fastnesses and cool forest paths; or sat idly by some
little stream on the fresh, green moss, with a line dancing on the
crystal water, amusing themselves by the fiction that it was fishing
upon which they were intent, and not the dear delight of watching one
another's faces reflected from the placid stream. They spent hours at
home, reading bits of poems, or singing scraps of love-songs, talking a
little, and then falling away into silence; or she sat perched on his
knee or the elbow of his chair, smoothing his sunny hair, stroking his
long, silky mustache, or looking into his answering eyes, till the world
lapsed quite away from them, and they thought themselves in heaven.
An idle, happy time! a time to make a worker sigh only to behold, and a
Benthamite lift his hands in deprecation and despair.
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