Ian took for us at the inn the very rooms he had taken before for Mrs. James and me; and in his arms, with no lamplight but the heather moon smiling through the window at us, I told him about my dream of his bringing me the locked ebony and silver box, which could be opened only with the rainbow key.
"It was a true dream, my darling," he said. "My heart was locked up in a box for many years, and nobody but you could have opened it, for you are you, and you have the key of the rainbow in your little hands. Never will the box be locked again. Now my heart doesn't need, doesn't want a box, because it is forever in your keeping."
There, at Sweetheart Abbey, in the little inn where I first began to ask myself if Ian were not the One Man beside whom all others were shadows, we told each other things and explained things that had seemed mysterious.
I told him how I had worshipped him from the beginning, and couldn't help going on to care more and more, though I feared that he liked Mrs. West, and thought of me only as a child. "But I wasn't a child," I said. "From the first minute I loved you I was a woman."
"You must have been a baby, or you would never have thought for a second that I or any man could remember Mrs. West's existence when you were there," he said scornfully. But as he was holding me very tightly in his arms, the scorn did not hurt. "How you could believe her, when she told you that what I did for you was from duty, I can't conceive. If you were the heroine of one of Basil's novels there might be some excuse for you. Heroines of stories always believe any wild thing the villain or villainess chooses to tell them, but a real girl, with brains and eyes and at least some common sense——"
"Do you think when you're in love your common sense can stay on top?" I asked. "It seemed too good to be true that you could love me, and she was far more fascinating than I! And you knew and liked her first, and had asked her to take a long motor trip with you: and it was true that you quarrelled about me. Looking back it all seemed so natural, especially remembering how you kept away from me and schemed—actually schemed—to have me go about with other men, why shouldn't I believe a woman much older than I, when she cried as she told me the story? Why, at this very place, after you'd been so heavenly to me in the Abbey, you were horrid next day, almost cross: and so you were often. You hurt my feelings a dozen times a day, and every other man I saw was kinder."
"Because they weren't fighting a great fight with themselves, as I was," he said, holding me a little more closely, if possible. "They, the selfish chaps, were letting themselves go. I was saying to myself, 'Perhaps I'm too old and hard for her. I'm the first man she's ever known. I must give her a chance to see and talk with others. For her own sake, I mustn't yield to temptation and try to snatch her away from the rest. Norman must have his chance. Douglas must have his chance. The American boys must have theirs——' and by Jove, you seemed to like giving it to them! You nearly drove me out of my mind."
"I thought you were being bored with me."
"You darling, adorable little idiot, as if a man could be bored with you!"
"I didn't know."