It did not pour the next morning. It was cloudless and windless and warm. And looking round on the familiar landscape that she had known when she was a little child, it seemed now to Gwenna as if War could not be. As if it were all a dream and a delusion. There was no khaki to be met in that little hillside village of purple slate and grey stone. Only one or two well-known figures were missing from it. A keeper from one of the big houses on the other side of the river, and an English chauffeur had joined the colours, but that nine-days' wonder was over now. Peace had made her retreat in these mountain fastnesses that had once echoed to the war-shouts and the harp-music of a race so martial.
It was the music that had survived....
Paul Dampier had put on again that well-known and well-worn grey tweed jacket of his, so that he also no longer recalled War. He had come right away from all that, as she had known he would; come safely back to her. Here he was, with her, and with a miracle between them, in this valley of crystal brooks and golden bracken and purple slopes. It was meant that they two should be together thus. Nothing could have stopped it. She felt herself exulting and triumphing over all the Fates who might have tried to stop it; and over all the Forces that might have tried to keep him from her. His work on the Machine? Pooh! That had actually helped to bring them together! The Great War? Here he was, home from the War!
"I've always, always wanted to be with you in the real country, and I never have," she told him, as together they ran down the slate steps of Uncle Hugh's porch after breakfast and turned up a path between the sunny larch-grown steeps. That path would be a torrent in the winter time. Now the slate pebbles of it were hot under the sun. "I don't really count that country, that field, that day——"
"Didn't seem to mind it when we were there," he teased her as he walked beside her swinging the luncheon basket that Margaret had put up for them. "I mean of course when I was there."
Gwenna affected to gasp over the conceit of men. "If I've got to be with one," she told him as if wearily, "I'd rather it was in a nice place for me to listen to his nonsense."
"Wasn't any 'nonsense,' as you call it, in that field."
"No," agreed Gwenna, "there wasn't."
He looked sideways and down at her as she climbed that hill-path, hatless, sure-footed and supple. Then a narrow turn in the path made her walk a little ahead of him. She was wearing a very simple little sheath of a grey cotton or muslin or something frock, with a white turn-down collar that he hadn't seen her in before, he thought. Suited her awfully well. (Being a man, he could not be expected to recognise it for the grey linen that she'd had on when he'd come upon her that afternoon, high up on the scaffolding at Westminster.)
"Yes, though, there was 'nonsense,'" he said, now suddenly answering her last speech. "Fact of the matter is, it was dashed nonsense to waste such a lot of time."