Their love had grown conscious of its eternity.
It held but one lasting sadness,--that it might not be revealed to Jenny.

So little did they regard their love as one essentially for concealment, that the temptation to include Jenny in their bond was at moments a danger.

It was so beautiful, and actually, though unconsciously, she was so integral a part of its beauty.
Theirs was that dream of a threefold union, in which, so to say, jealousy shall be so taken into the confidence of, so held to the heart of, love, that it shall transform itself into love too; and, from being the lonely tragic third, become, as the other two, one of an indivisible trinity.

Such unions of natures of especial grace have been born under like conditions of fated intercourse, and they have been unions of a strange beauty, the more blest by the sense of a conquest over love's one unworthiness, its egoism.

As the _egoisme a deux_ is finer than an egoism of one, so this _egoisme a trois_, if you will, is again finer by its additional inclusiveness.
Perhaps it had proved wiser in the end to yield to this temptation too.
But the tragic risk was one to dismay experiment.