"Whether you're afraid or not, you won't run away. Remember Curly!"
She turned to him with affectionate friendliness. "But you'll be there in this too, so far as you can, won't you? Don't forsake me, will you? It's sometimes—very difficult." Her face lit up in a smile again. "I hope it'll make a man of me, as father used to say of that odious hunting."
It had, at least, made an end of the mere child in her. The discernment of her lover's trouble, the ignorance of whence it came, the need of fighting it—she faced these things as part of her work. Her engagement was no more either amazement merely, or merely joy. She might still be afraid of dogs, or shrink from a butcher's shop. She knew a difficulty when she saw one, and for love's sake faced it. Andy thought it made the love dearer to her; with an inward groan he saw that it did. For he was afraid. What she told of Harry told more than she could fathom for herself.
Andy was a partisan. He cried whole-heartedly, "The pity for Vivien!" He could say, "The pity for Harry!" for old Harry's sake, and more for Vivien's. No, "The pity for Isobel!" was breathed in his heart. The case seemed to him a plain one there; and he was not of the party who would have the Recording Angel as liberal with tears as with ink, sedulously obliterating everything that he punctiliously wrote—in the end, on that view, a somewhat ineffectual registrar, who might be spared both ink and tears, and provided with a retiring pension by triumphant believers in Necessity. It may come to that.
"I think Harry may be wanting me." She rose in her slim grace, and held out a hand to him—not in formal farewell, but in an impulse of good-will. She had come into her heritage of womanhood, and bore it with a shy stateliness. "Thank you"—a pause rather merry than timid—"Thank you, policeman Andy."
"No, but I thank you—and you seem to me rather like the queen of the fairies."
She smiled, and sighed lightly. "If I can make the king think so always!"
Then she was gone, a white shadow gliding over the grass—a woman now, still in a child's shape. She flitted past Isobel Vintry, kissing her hand, and so passed in to where "Harry wanted her."
Politeness dictated that Andy, thus left to himself, should join his hostess; he did not know that she was asleep, quite sound asleep by now.
Having sat down before he discovered this state of affairs, he found himself committed to a virtual tête-à-tête with Isobel Vintry, quite the last thing he desired. He did not find it easy to open the conversation.