They were reading a book together, a book that had evidently provoked the disturbing laughter and brought a grim look of amusement to the old man’s face. The noise made by David, however, broke up their pleasant occupation. The girl turned her head, gazing curiously at the spot whence came the sound of rustling leaves. What she saw stirred her as nothing ever had before. Her glance met David’s; and to both of them it seemed as if all their lives they had been waiting for the revelation of that moment. Her pulse quickened; her cheek paled, then grew rosy red; her gray eyes dilated with mingled alarm and pleasure.
The sudden, deep impression was dashed by a singular interruption. The girl’s companion, his back half turned to David, his face still expressive of amusement, and looking straight before him at the ripple of water kissing the pebbles at his feet, spoke in a loud, harsh voice:
“Una,” he said, “remember the schoolmaster! This man’s world is not ours. What does he know of Rysdale?”
She looked down confusedly, aware that her uncle—for it was Harold Leighton—without seeing this stranger who had so quickly aroused her interest, spoke as if he knew who he was and all about him. When she looked again, David was gone.
Between that first meeting and this evening, a year after, when they stood together in Una’s garden at Stoneleigh, they had lived through much of Love’s first golden record. Their experiences had not always been cloudless. Harold Leighton, it is true, did not actively oppose their marriage; but he had borne himself in a manner that showed, at times, either a singular indifference, or a covert mistrust of the man who was so soon to take from him his brother’s only daughter. It might be from jealousy, it might be from a perfectly natural feeling of caution; at any rate, he never discussed their plans with them, he never explained his attitude towards them. Never again did he allude to the schoolmaster, nor account for the strange words he had used on the little island in Derwentwater.
For the most part he watched their courtship with a sort of whimsical curiosity, but always withholding his assent from the marriage to which they looked forward. Una was indignant at his final attempt to separate them. His suspicions and David’s quixotic manner of meeting them increased her faith in her lover. Never before had she been so perfectly happy as she was this evening with him in the garden’s autumnal silence.
“It will soon be forever,” she whispered.
“You are not afraid?”
“If it were possible for our love to die, if it were as shortlived as the sunflowers, if some one had the power to take it from us, I would be afraid. Tell me that no one has the power, David.”
He held her from him for a space, his eyes searching hers.