Without a thought or a word--for it was Nature speaking in the language of Love, which is a silent tongue--I stepped towards her and took her in my arms.

She yielded with that sweet unconsciousness which is the perfection of Love, as if it was in obedience to some command uttered before the beginning of the world.

Probably without any conscious effort on either side--I know there was none on mine--our mouths met in the first kiss of love.
At the time nothing in the meeting struck me as out of the common.

But later in the night, when I was alone and in darkness, whenever I thought of it all--its strangeness and its stranger rapture--I could not but be sensible of the bizarre conditions for a love meeting.

The place lonely, the time night, the man young and strong, and full of life and hope and ambition; the woman, beautiful and ardent though she was, a woman seemingly dead, clothed in the shroud in which she had been wrapped when lying in her tomb in the crypt of the old church.
Whilst we were together, anyhow, there was little thought of the kind; no reasoning of any kind on my part.