For Roland had risen, moved deeply by the sight of April’s misery, her pathetic weakness. It was not fair. First of all he had been beastly to her, then her mother had made a fool of her. He found her in the dining room, huddled on a chair beside the fire. She turned at once to him for sympathy. She stretched out her arms, and he ran towards them, knelt before her and buried his face in her lap.
“We have been such beasts to you, April, all of us. I have felt so miserable about it all day. I didn’t know what to do. I thought you would never forgive me. I don’t deserve to be forgiven; but I love you; I do, really awfully!”
“That’s all right,” she said; “don’t worry,” and placing her hand beneath his chin she raised gently his face to hers.
It was a long kiss, one of those long passionless kisses of sympathy, pity and contrition that smooth out all difficulties, as a wave that passes over a stretch of sand leaving behind it a shining surface. For a long while they sat in each other’s arms, saying nothing, his fingers playing with her hair, her lips from moment to moment meeting his. When at last they reverted to the subject of their morning’s quarrel there was little possibility of dissension.
It was with a gay smile that she asked him why he had been so angry with her. “Why shouldn’t our parents know, Roland? They would have had to some day.”
“Oh, yes, of course, but——”
“And surely, Roland, dear,” she continued, “it’s better for us that they should know. I should have hated having to do things in secret. It would have been exciting, of course; I know that; but it wouldn’t have been fair to them, would it? They are so fond of us; they ought to have a share in our happiness.”
“That’s just what I felt,” Roland objected. “I had felt that our love had ceased to be our own, that they had taken too big a share of it. It didn’t seem to be our love affair any longer.”
“Oh, you silly darling!” and she laughed happily, relieved of her fear that there might be some deeper cause for Roland’s behavior to her. “Why should you worry about that? What does it matter if other people do know about it? Why, what’s an engagement but a letting of a lot of other people into our secret; and when we’re married, why, that’s a telling of everyone in the whole world that we’re in love with one another. What does it matter if others know?”
“I suppose it doesn’t,” Roland dubiously admitted.