In that atmosphere of perfect bliss Godfrey's cure was quick. For bliss it was, save only that there was another bliss beyond to be attained. Remember that this man, now approaching middle life, had never drunk of the cup of what is known as love upon the earth.
Some might answer that such is the universal experience; that true, complete love has no existence, except it be that love of God to which a few at last attain, since in what we know as God completeness and absolute unity can be found alone. Other loves all have their flaws, with one exception perhaps, that of the love of the dead which fondly we imagine to be unchangeable. For the rest passion, however exalted, passes or at least becomes dull with years; the most cherished children grow up, and in so doing, by the law of Nature, grow away; friends are estranged and lost in their own lives.
Upon the earth there is no perfect love; it must be sought elsewhere, since having the changeful shadows, we know there is a sky wherein shines the sun that casts them.
Godfrey, as it chanced, omitting Isobel, had walked little even in these sweet shadows. There were but three others for whom he had felt devotion in all his days, Mrs. Parsons, his tutor, Monsieur Boiset, and his friend, Arthur Thorburn, who was gone. Therefore to him Isobel was everything. As a child he had adored her; as a woman she was his desire, his faith and his worship.
If this were so with him, still more was it the case with Isobel, who in truth cared for no other human being. Something in her nature prevented her from contracting violent female friendships, and to all men, except a few of ability, each of them old enough to be her father, she was totally indifferent; indeed most of them repelled her. On Godfrey, and Godfrey alone, from the first moment she saw him as a child she had poured all the deep treasure of her heart. He was at once her divinity and her other self, the segment that completed her life's circle, without which it was nothing but a useless, broken ring.
So much did this seem to her to be so, that notwithstanding her lack of faith in matters beyond proof and knowledge, she never conceived of this passion of hers as having had a beginning, or of being capable of an end. This contradictory woman would argue against the possibility of any future existence, yet she was quite certain that her love for Godfrey had a future existence, and indeed one that was endless. When at length he put it to her that her attitude was most illogical, since that which was dead and dissolved could not exist in any place or shape, she thought for a while and replied quietly: "Then I must be wrong."