She stretched out her hand and her voice trembled.
“You will not see the maid of honour perhaps ever again. Her task is done,” she added.
I took her hand, touched by her accent of earnestness, and gratefully awoke to the fact that she alone had made the impossible possible to my desire. I looked at her face, close to mine in the faint light; and as she smiled at me, a little sadly, I was struck with the delicate beauty of the curve of her lip, and the exquisite finishing touch of the dimple that came and went beside it, and the thought flashed into my mind—“That little maid may one day blossom into the sort of woman that drives men mad.”
She slipped her hand from mine as I would have kissed it, and nodded at me with a return of the cool impudence that had so often vexed me.
“Good-bye, gallant cavalier,” she said mockingly.
She whistled as if for a dog, and I saw the black figure of the nurse start from the shadow of the trees a few yards away, and, meeting, they joined in the mist and merged swiftly into it.
Whereupon I mounted the mare, who was sorely tried by her long waiting; and as we cantered homewards I was haunted, through the extraordinary blaze of my triumphant thoughts, to my own exasperation and surprise, oddly and unwillingly, by the arch sweetness of the maid of honour’s smile.
And once (I blushed all alone in the darkness for the shame of such a thought in my mind at such a moment) I caught myself picturing the sweetness a man might find in pressing his lips upon the tantalising dimple.