“Oh, all right. But why? It’s not a bit dark!”
Laura did not attempt to explain.
CHAPTER XIX
Justin hurried off down the road. Laura waited a little while, looking after him, ready to wave and smile if he should look back. He would have seen, if he had been Oliver to perceive it, a pretty enough picture, for the rockery behind her glowed like a Persian carpet, and she stood at the gate between the copper-black hollyhocks, a princesse lointaine among her Nubians, looking out so eagerly over the bars, hands half raised for beckoning.
But Justin, even if he had thought of it, had not time to look back. As it was, he barely escaped being late for his tea.
Laura, when the bend of the road had quite hidden him, gave, for all her wistful last glances, a little sigh of relaxation. She had held him while she could, and counted each moment a gain; yet she had wanted him to go. Her instinct, standing godmother to her inexperience, put her on her guard, would not allow her to show him the intensity of the happiness he had created in her. Yet discretion was not easy, with the lust of self-confession—that age-old familiar of a woman in love—playing its devil’s game with her self-control. She wanted to be alone—she who was Psyche in Olympus, the first draught of nectar driving dizzily through her veins: she knew she must have breathing-pause, must for an instant put down the inexhaustible cup, lest the immortal wine should choke her.
She turned from the road, and swerving aside, like a shy beast, from the eyes of the many-windowed house, sped down the warden paths to the orchard, that immemorial play-ground, her kingdom of deep grass and monstrous buttercups, an Avalon at whose corners oaks stood guardian, whose brook-rooted bramble hedges, high and overhanging, walled it impenetrably against the outer world.
She did not stay to secure the rickety gate, and it clicked and cluttered behind her like a cracked bell as she ran on through the sunshine and the grass to the little shady hollow beyond the apple trees and there flung herself upon the ground, like a child dropping headlong upon its mother’s lap.
And because she had no mother, and her heart was full, she turned in all simplicity to her prayers. Overhead a lark was singing, and she listened, her chin in her fists, her elbows digging into the soft earth, her broken phrases swelling his ecstasy—