"I thank Heaven!" he said. "And I thank her for wanting a rest. Good as she is, three would be a crowd in Sweetheart Abbey."
Speaking of her made me think of the time. We had promised Mrs. James to go back in half an hour for dinner! Already more than half an hour had slipped away as we made our air-film photographs to haunt Sweetheart Abbey with all its other ghosts.
The twilight was changing to a light more mysterious, and as we looked at each other through the opal haze I felt strangely that we were changing too. It was as if our realities were less real than the shadow pictures which were to live on here together forever—as if our bodies, which would go away and separate, to live different lives far away from one another, would not be us any more.
I could not have imagined so wonderful a light as that which illuminated the great rose-window and filled the vast broken shell of the Abbey. It was as if the day had been poured out of a cup, and night was being slowly poured in—the dove-gray night of dreams. It was pale, yet not bright like the light of dawn. It was more like a light glimmering over a sheet of water, a light made of the water itself. Almost I expected to see the Heart rise up in the ebony and silver box, and the box opening.
"You look like a young seeress," my Knight said. "What is it that you see with your great eyes gazing through the dusk?"
"I see—a heart," I answered. "I think I see a heart."
"That is very intelligent of you," he said, in a changed tone. "Come, child, it's time I took you home."
"Is there the ghost of a heart floating here?" I asked, wishing to linger. But he took my hand and drew me toward the gate.
"To me," he said dryly, "it appears to be a real heart—almost too real for comfort."
We walked back to the inn, and he was uninterestingly commonplace all the way. He talked about dinner, and buying petrol for the car, and told me dull facts about tiresome things called carburettors. It would have been a horrid anticlimax, spoiling all the romance of Sweetheart Abbey, if he had not changed later on. But he did change. There was a little piano in the sitting-room they gave us, and Mrs. James began drumming out a few Scotch airs, warbling the words in a high, thin voice rather like that of an intelligent insect. There was one tune I knew, and I couldn't resist joining in. At the end Sir S. applauded.