She could find nothing to say that should be at once true and kind.

"So that's all over," he said, straightening his shoulders. "There's only one thing more. You remember I went out to see about the car at Tunbridge, and I was rather a long time gone? Well, I rushed into a shop and bought this. I meant to throw it over Westminster Bridge as soon as I left you--but now, will you take it for a wedding-present? I'd like you to."

He fumbled at a spring, opened a case, and showed a half-hoop of sapphires.

"But I can't! It's too--"

"I'm _awfully_ rich," he said, bitterly. "I've come into my father's business at Canterbury. I don't know what to do with my money, and the thing didn't cost much, really, but it was the best I could get. You believe that, don't you? And I thought it might be the beginning of living happy ever after, and I should like you to have it, just to show you really have forgiven me. You will, won't you?"

"I can't take the ring," she said, "but I wish I could, and I thank you very much for wishing me to have it--and for all your kindness and your kind thoughts of me."

"But you won't take the ring. He said you wouldn't."

"Who did?"

"My confessor. You see, I'm a Catholic, and I had to tell him about Kenilworth, and so I told him the whole thing. If it hadn't been for him I shouldn't have tried to tell you about it all and get you to forgive me. I'm glad I did, though."

Then she understood, and ceased to wonder how this man had got his poor, complicated, involved little history straightened out to such a convincing simplicity.

"I wish you'd have had the ring," he said again, discontentedly. "I never know what to do with my money."

"If I had a lot of money I'd go about the world trying to be a real knight-errant--just looking out for people who want things and don't ask for them--poor, proud, self-respecting people, poor schoolmasters and young men in shops who don't have good times. There was a man in a book who thought he was ill, and his doctor told him to help one person a day with his money. He got cured in no time; and you're not ill."

"I shouldn't know how to begin," he said. "You could have shown me, but you won't. Look here, don't go yet; stay a little and tell me how to begin."

Walking around and around the railings of the garden, she developed her thesis. They had been walking together for an hour and a half before they parted on her door-step, and at parting she did give him her hand.

In the hall she stood a minute or two, thinking. Then she slipped quietly out again and took an omnibus to Museum Street, and from there walked to Montague Street. She felt that the only important thing was to see Edward, to clear away the one cloud of concealment that lay between them--no, not the only one. The other was a very little thing; he, at least, had never known that it was there.

But when she reached number 37 it showed no light at any of its windows; only the bas.e.m.e.nt window and the fanlight above the door gave out a dusky radiance. It seemed impossible to ring the bell and be faced with the a.s.surance that he was not at home. So she walked slowly away.

And behind drawn curtains in the flower-scented, flower-bright room Charles stirred restlessly, and Edward, also restless, was saying, "I could almost believe that she would come to-night, now. All the rest of the time I have known in my heart that she would not come, but now, for the first time, it seems possible."

But the hours wore on and still he and the flowers and Charles were alone together.

XIX

HURSTMONCEAUX

THE sky was gray; gray mists veiled the sea and wisps of sea-fog lay in the hollows of the downs. The young morning had not yet decided whether it meant to be, when it was a grown-up day, a very wet day, when your umbrella is useless and you give it up and make up your mind to be wet through and change as soon as you get home; or a very fine day, one of those radiant, blazing days that are golden to the very end, days when you almost forget it ever has rained, and find it hard to believe that it will ever rain again. It was one of those mornings whose development is as darkly hid as the future of any babe smiling at you from its cradle and defying you to foresee whether it will grow up to be a great criminal or a great saint. If you love the baby, and trim its cradle with hopes and dreams, you will find it hard to believe that the darling can grow up just n.o.body in particular, like the rest of us.

To Edward, lying at his long length on the short turf and looking out to the opalescent mist that hid the sea, it was not possible to believe that this day of all days could be anything but very good or very bad.

The elements must be for him or against him, must help or hinder. That they could be indifferent was unthinkable.

For this was the day of days, come, at last, after weeks of a waiting that had not been patient, the day when he should, indeed, and not in dreams, see her again.

This was the thought, insistent, even in his sleep, that had at last broken up that sleep, as a trickle of water breaks up the embankment of a reservoir, letting out the deep floods inclosed by that barrier, the deep flood of pent-up longing which sleep could no longer restrain from consciousness.

So he had got up and come out to look over the sea and think of her.

Her letters made a bulge in his coat pocket; he pulled them out--a fat little bundle secured by an elastic band--and he read:

It is strange that you should have been expecting to see me just then, because just then I really had come as far as the door of your house--only everything was dark except for a murky star of gas that had been turned down in the hall. So I told myself that you weren't there, and I didn't want to be told so by any one else, and I went home. I like your letter; I like it very, very much, but it makes me see how stupid and selfish I have been to let you stay in London in the summer-time, waiting all the time for some one who never comes. And I want you to go away, right into the country, and I'll write to you as soon as Aunt Alice goes abroad. She is very, very much better. It won't be long now. A week, perhaps? Two weeks? Go away where it is green and glorious, and I shall think of you all the time and wish myself where you are.

At first when I read your letter I thought that I must see you just once before you go away. But now I see that I won't see you. If I were to see you it would not really make anything any easier. And nothing is very easy, as it is. You understand, don't you?

He hoped he did understand. If he understood, her letter meant the beginning of the end of the incredible honeymoon. For he dared to read the letter as he desired to read it, and where she had written, "If I were to see you it would not really make anything easier, and nothing is very easy," he had read, "If I were to see you I should find it too hard to part from you again," and next moment cursed himself for a presumptuous fool. What was he that the G.o.ds should now and thus renew to him an a.s.surance that had once been his for a few magic hours, in the wild night-rush of a London-bound train, when the air was scented with the roses of dreams and the lady of all dreams slept upon his shoulder?

For in those long and lonely days, in his London lodging, that a.s.surance had dwindled, shriveled, faded to a maddening incert.i.tude; the whole splendid pageant of his days had faded and shrunk to the pale substance of a vision.

Presumptuous or not, foolish or wise, the meaning which her letter might have revived his spirit, as the sweet air of dawn revives a man who comes out of a darkened prison to meet the waxing light and the first twitter of the newly awakened birds.

He had written:

I will go away--I will go away to the sea and wait there for you. You are right, as always. If I am not to see you it is less intolerable not to be near you.

I hardly dare to read in your letter what I wish you could have meant me to read. But I warn you that when once I have you again I shall never let you go.

She had not answered that, though she had written every day, little, friendly, intimate notes, telling him of every day's little happenings and what were to be the happenings of the morrow. She told him, at last, that the aunt was really going, and when. She wrote:

The aunts are going to Scotland and I shall be left to see Aunt Alice off, and then, when she is gone, I will write and make an a.s.signation with my friend and comrade, and we will go back to the good, green country. It won't be all different, will it? People meet again after years and don't recognize each other.

I suppose they have been changing, changing a little bit every day. Do you think we shall have changed--contrariwise? You one way and I the other, I mean, so that when we do meet we sha'n't be the same?

The last letter of all was the shortest. "Monday," it said at the top of its page, and then:

Auntie leaves Folkestone to-morrow by the morning boat. I will let you know where to find me. Would Thursday suit you, in the afternoon?

He had felt no doubt as to that. Thursday would not suit him--but Tuesday would--and not the afternoon, but the morning. Had she really thought that he would wait two days?

And now, lying on the turf, he read her letters through and laid his face down on the last and dreamed a little, with closed eyes; and when he lifted his head again the mist had grown thin as a bridal veil and the sun was plain to be seen, showing a golden face above the sea, where a million points of light gleamed like tinsel through a curtain of gossamer. The air was warmer, the scent of the wild thyme sweeter and stronger, and overhead, in the gray that was growing every moment clearer and bluer, the skylarks were singing again.

"I knew," said Edward, as he went down toward the town where the smoke of the newly lighted fires rose straight from the chimneys--"I knew it couldn't have the heart not to be fine, on this day of all days."

He went back to his hotel and inspected once more certain of the purchases he had made since her decree had banished him from London.

Resisting a momentary impulse toward asceticism in the matter of breakfast, as an outward and visible testimony to the unimportance of material things at such a time as this, he found himself at the other end of the pendulum's swing, ordering just such a meal as he would have ordered had she been with him, and ate his grape-fruit and omelette and delicately browned fish with thoughtful appreciation, making of them a banquet in her honor. He toasted her in the coffee, and, as he ate, romance insisted that it was not himself, but her man, whom he was treating to that perfectly served breakfast; and common sense added, "Yes, and no man's at his best if he's hungry." Before he reached the marmalade he had come to regard that impulse to tea and toast as a man might regard a vanished temptation to alcoholic excess.

"A hungry man's only half a man--the bad-tempered half," he said, lighting his first cigarette, and strolling out into the sunny inn-yard, where a hostler with a straw in his mouth was busy with a bucket of water and a horse's legs; a pleasanter man, Edward thought, than the other man there, busy with oil and petrol and cotton-waste and a very new motor-car.

"I wish motors had never been invented," he told himself.

All the same, when the hour-gla.s.s of time had let through the last grain of the s.p.a.ce of their separation, and a pale girl withdrew her eyes from the speck of a boat growing smaller and smaller on a sea that sparkled so brilliantly that you could hardly look at it, and almost listlessly turned to walk back alone to her hotel, she was confronted with a very pale young man standing beside a very new motor-car.

"You!" she said, and, as once before, the blood rushed to her face, and his to his, answering.

This was the moment for which he had lived for weeks--and they shook hands like strangers! She was grave and cold. What would her first words be?

"But I said Thursday," she said.