“I mean,” she said, “that I never quite left off thinking that I might have the luck to be the second best. I suppose it’s the sort of thing that has been said a good many times. . . . I think I have always thought you would find me.”
After a momentary pause she went on: “We need not remember about that old quarrel; I think it was always something much better and much worse than a quarrel. My father was less to blame than you thought him; more to blame than I thought him; but it is neither you nor I that are to judge. But it was not he who did the real wrong of which all these wrongs have sprung.”
“I know what you mean,” he replied. “I had rather begun to think so myself, the more I read of history. But in all that history there is nothing so noble as you and what you have done. You are the greatest of historical characters; and the learned may come to call you a legend.”
“It was Olive who understood it first,” she said gravely. “She is so much quicker than I am and saw it all in a flash; a flash of moonlight, as she said. I could only go away and think things out slowly and stupidly by myself; but I got there at last.”
“Do you mean,” asked Michael slowly, “that Olive Ashley also has–got there?”
“Yes,” she replied, “and the odd thing is that John Braintree doesn’t seem to mind a bit. At least a good many people would think it odd; they are married now and they seem to agree about almost everything. I wonder how much there really was for good people to disagree about in those quarrelsome old times.”
“I know,” he answered. “Everybody seems to be married. And it has made me feel pretty lost and lonely in the last month or so.”
“Even Monkey is married, I hear,” she said. “It seems like the end of the world. But perhaps its the beginning of the world. One thing you may be sure of, though lots of people would laugh at it. Whenever Monks come back, marriages will come back.”
“He went back to that seaside town and married Dr. Hendry’s daughter,” explained Michael Herne rather vaguely. “We parted by a sort of silent consent at Seawood Abbey and he went west and I east. I had to go and look for you alone: and I was very much alone.”
“You say ‘was,’” she said with a smile; and they suddenly moved towards each other and met as they had met in the garden long ago–in a silence full of many things; a silence which he broke by saying suddenly, in his abrupt and awkward way: “I suppose I am a heretic.”