“Ever your devoted friend,
“M. Wynne.
“PS.—Your sympathy for my hateful position will make you, I know, at once destroy this record of it.”
Five hours afterwards he was walking up the hill that led to Felicia. The journey had been a lethargy, and now, under the sweet spring sky, he felt his spirits rise at every stride. He paused, with an almost tremulous smile, at that turning in the lane where first they had met. How he had hungered for a sight of her in all these months of parting; he realized that now. After all, he could claim a little heroism for the self-control that had kept him from her. Smudges and heroism!—how oddly things got mixed in life! But smudges must be resolutely forgotten; he would live them down; he had already lived them down in the very determination never again to get smudged. In this environment that spoke only of Felicia, the thought of Angela was far away. When it drew near he turned from it with impatience—almost with resentment.
In Felicia’s garden the trees showed a frail web of green against the sky. A slender almond tree, in bloom, looked to Maurice like a little angel at the gates of Paradise. Life had exquisite, atoning moments; the joy of this one in its poignancy seized his throat in a choking sob so that he could scarcely breathe, and there was pain in the rapture.
The maid told him that Miss Merrick was in the sitting-room. Maurice pushed before her and entered, closing the door behind him.
Felicia sat near the window. She had changed terribly; yet she was more beautiful than ever. He understood her look of blankness; the greatness of her emotion drew all expression from her face.
A wave of adoration swept over him, and with it the thought of smudges, of his unworthiness, of her love and suffering struck through him, shattering his baser self. He stumbled forward and fell at her knees.
They were together, and for her—for him—the past was forgotten. Yet as Felicia leaned to him, happy with a gladness too deep for tears or smiles, dimly there drifted over her that sense of a dream, and in it, like a vivid start that comes in sleep, the thought of Geoffrey. It hurt her, and, again like the striving in a dream to recall, to grasp at, a meaning that sinks from us, she felt, dimly, for the hurt; was it for him?—for herself? The love in Maurice’s eyes drew her from dreams; yet in clasping him, loving him, she seemed to clasp and love some other cherished being; as a mother, holding her living child, feels in her heart an aching, shrouded love for the child that died before it breathed.