To-day, for the first time, the hint of a cloud had crept into the sky.
“And to-morrow, Eppie, ends our tête-à-tête,” he said. “Or will Grainger make as little of a third as the general and Miss Barbara?”
“He sha’n’t spoil things, if that’s what you mean,” said Eppie.
She wore a white dress and a white hat wreathed with green; the emerald drops trembled in the shadow of her hair. She made him think of some wandering princess in an Irish legend, with the white and green and the tranquil shining of her eyes.
“Not our things, perhaps; but can’t he interfere with them? He will want to talk with you about all the things we go on so happily without talking of.”
“I’ll talk to him and go on happily with you.”
It was almost on his lips to ask her if she could marry Grainger and still go on happily, like this, with him, Gavan. That it should have seemed possible to ask it showed how far into fairy-land they had wandered; but it was one of the turnings that one didn’t choose to take; one was warned in one’s sleep of lurking dangers on that road. It might lead one straight out of fairy-land, straight into uncomfortable waking.
“How happily we do go on, Eppie,” was what he did choose to say. “More happily than ever before. What a contrast this—to East London.”
She glanced at him. “And to Surrey.”
“And to Surrey,” he accepted.