“There’s a little matter I want to talk over with you, Le Sage,” said Warren, as they got up from table, “if it isn’t trenching on your Sabbath rest.”
“Oh, Sabbath rest be hanged,” answered Le Sage, shortly. “Come along.”
“Father, don’t talk in that abominably heathenish way,” laughed Lalanté. “Before your children too!”
She and Wyvern, both, and again, appreciated Warren’s tact, for neither of them believed in the pretext. They had not been alone together yet, and Warren, like the good fellow he was, had resolved that they should be. That was how they read it.
So while the other two adjourned to Le Sage’s business den, these two adjourned to the stoep. The small boys, like their kind, unable to keep still for any length of time, betook themselves off somewhere down in the garden.
“Love, and so you are really going,” began Lalanté with her hand in his.
“Really. But it is going only to return.”
“Yes, I feel that. Yet—it is like parting with one’s very life.”
“That is how I feel it. And yet—and yet—this time somehow I am sanguine. I have a sort of instinct that things are going to mend; that one’s luck cannot always be on the down grade. I can’t tell why, but something—a sort of revelation, perhaps—has come to me telling me I am doing right in going away from here—wrench though it will be. But mere locality—why that’s nothing as long as we have each other. Is it?”
“Darling, you know it is not,” she answered, her head resting in the hollow of his shoulder. “If it were a mere rock island in the middle of the sea and I had you, it would be Paradise.”