"I shall love all your friends," she said, with a bright look. "I'm glad
you have so many!"
"Does that mean that you've felt rather lonely sometimes? Poor darling!"
he said, tenderly, "it must have been solitary often at Portofino."
"Oh no--I had papa." Then her truthfulness overcame her. "I don't mean
to say I didn't often want friends of my own age--girl friends
especially."
"You can't have them now!"--he said, passionately, as they paused at a
wicket-gate, under a yew-tree. "I want you all--all--to myself." And in
the shadow of the yew he put his arms round her again, and their hearts
beat together.
But our nature moves within its own inexorable limits. In Diana,
Marsham's touch, Marsham's embrace awakened that strange mingled
happiness, that happiness reared and based on tragedy, which the pure
and sensitive feel in the crowning moments of life. Love is tortured by
its own intensity; and the thought of death strikes through the
experience which means the life of the race. As her lips felt Marsham's
kiss, she knew, as generations of women have known before her, that life
could give her no more; and she also knew that it was transiency and
parting that made it so intolerably sweet.
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