Something had brought her up again now. His darkness. His misery. It was as if he saw her spread her wings and saw her eyes measuring, for them both, the spaces of sea and sky.
He remembered a picture in a book he had loved as a little boy: little Diamond held to the breast of the North Wind as she flies forth in her streaming hair against a sky of stars. So he felt himself lying on her breast and lifted with her.
“I’ve told you how happy I can be. It’s all true,” she said. “It’s all there. The light, the peace, the strength. I shall find them. And so will you.”
“Shall I?” he questioned gently. “Without you?”
“Yes. Without me. You will find them. But you won’t be without me,” said Adrienne.
Already she was finding them. He knew that, for, as she looked at him, he felt an influence passing from her to him like the laying of her hand upon his brow. But it was closer than that. It was to her breast that her eyes held him while, in a long silence, the compulsion of her faith flowed into him. First quietness; then peace; then a lifting radiance.
“Promise me,” he heard her say.
He did not know what it was he must promise, but he seemed to feel it all without knowing and he said: “I promise.”
She rose and stood above him. “You mustn’t regret. You mustn’t want.”
She laid her hands upon his shoulders as she spoke and looked down at him, so austere, so radiant. “Anything else would have spoiled it. We were only meant to find each other like this and then to part.”