Guy was passing to the D major movement. His back was turned to them. They sat gazing at each other. They sat gazing at each other in a new kind of avowal. All the things he dared not say and she dared not listen to were poured from the one to the other through their eyes. She spoke hurriedly, breathlessly.
"I want you to know that if we enter the war, and you're sent over there, I'll find a way to go too."
He began some kind of protest, but she silenced him.
"I know how I could do it. There's a woman in Paris who'd take me on to work with her. You see, I'm used to Europe. You're not. I can't bear to think of you—with no family—so far away from everyone—and all alone. I'll go."
Before he could seize anything like the full import of what she was telling him she had slipped away again. Guy was still playing, martially and majestically.
Tom sat wrapt in a sudden amazed tranquillity. Now that she had told him, told him more, far more, than was in her words, he was not surprised; he was only reassured. He realized that it was what he had expected. He had not expected it in the mind, nor precisely with the heart. If the heart has reasons which the reason doesn't know, it was something beyond even these. The nearest he could come to it, now that he tried to express it by the processes of thought, was that between him and her there existed a community of life which they had only to take for granted. She was taking it for granted. To find out if she loved him he would never have to ask her; she would never have to ask him. They knew! He wondered if the knowledge brought to her the peace it brought to him. He felt that he knew that too.
Having ended his polonaise, Guy let his fingers run restlessly up and down the keys. He had not turned round; he had heard nothing; he hadn't guessed that Hildred had come and gone. That was their secret. They would keep it as a secret. One of them at least had no wish to make it known.
He had no wish that it should go farther, even between him and her, till the future had so shaped itself that he could be justified. That it should remain as it was, unspoken but understood, would for a long, long time to come be joy and peace for them both.
Suddenly Guy broke into a strain enraptured and exultant. It flung itself up on the air as easily as a bird's note. It was lyric gladness, welling from a heart that couldn't tire.
Caught by his own jubilance, Guy took up the melody in a tenor growing liquid and strong after the years of cracked girlishness.