After dinner I slipped away into the Great Hall alone.
He followed me and said,—
'The garden is very sweet to-night, won't you come out with me?'
It seemed as if he had the right to ask that I should go, and I the right to go since he had asked it.
Out in the warm, sweet night he told me a little of his life in India—of the loneliness of his frontier station, but the splendour of it, too. I caught the lure and glamour of the mountains he loved to climb with two faithful guides who went out to him from Switzerland year after year whenever he had leave. I guessed a little of the strenuous simplicity of the life of this man whose face had 'fixed me.'
And then there came a little silence which he broke by telling me that once in a London church he had seen 'a girl's face like a cameo, cut in the grayness of the wall behind.'
'I loved you then,' he said, 'I loved you in the woods that day—I love you now.'
And I? what did I do and say? Oh, what would any woman—out in the warm darkness with a man she'd hardly spoken to before? I chose to forget that moment in the woods when all my heart went out to him. I selected my words with daintiness and my sentences with care, and built up little barriers of aloofness all around me. I said that 'I must go in now, but that I had been so interested in all he'd told me of his life in India, that I would think of him sometimes climbing his mountains.' And as I turned to go out of the garden I added airily, 'Write? Oh, yes, perhaps I might even write occasionally. I liked writing to my friends. When he came home again in three years' time on leave we might even meet again. Perhaps—perhaps——'
But there were primal instincts at work that night out in the scented garden, and this gentleman, in conventional evening dress, suddenly reverted to the caveman who had seen his woman and quite definitely meant to have her. So with a certain ruthlessness that I discovered afterwards was typical of the man, he refused to let me go, but stormed the fortress of my heart with most exceeding suddenness. He brushed aside all my objections and the words and sentences chosen with such care, knocked down my carefully erected barriers and swept me off my feet, and swamped and drowned and deluged me in love, and with 'What does all that matter? You belong to me,' he took me in his arms and kissed me with a kiss that thrilled while it subdued me.
It seemed as if I had been with him in some dim, past age and then had somehow lost him, and had been restless ever since, striving to find what I had lost, and yet had been unconscious of the thing I sought until I found it, in a moment, in his arms.