There was nothing in this gift of youth for which he had clamored. Terry's youth, had he married her, would have been his scourge. He knew at last what it was that he required at the hands of a woman—it was rest.
There was no sound. The Castle was intensely still. He lowered the wick of the lamp before he left, watched the flame splutter and waited till it sank. Tiptoeing softly down the stairs, he slipped out noiselessly into the romance of the summer's night.
II
Next morning, for the first few seconds after he had wakened, he lay wondering why he was so happy. Then he remembered.
He had never had a friendship with a woman. From the start, though he had hidden the fact from himself, his supposed friendship with Maisie had been nothing less than lazy courtship. Terry had detected that when she had said that he wouldn't have been so interested in Maisie if she hadn't been so desperately good-looking. Until this morning he had had no faith in such friendships. He had believed that their fundamental attraction, however well concealed, must always be sex. They could never be more than a pretense, in which either the man or the woman was cheating—the one being anxious to give more than friendship, the other deriving amusement from giving less. He had held that such relations between men and women were inherently dishonest, doomed to end in a clash of
desire or to broaden into an honorable love affair. There was no middle course between coveting a woman and neglecting her as entirely dispensable.
But this morning his point of view was altered. He was confident that his interest in Lady Dawn was on an utterly different footing. He had never had this peacefulness of feeling for any woman. He marveled at it. He had to fight the disillusion that it might be no more than a mood. His liking for her had come to him so suddenly. Suddenness in the emotions prompted him to distrust. Yet his present contentment seemed as secure as it was incomprehensible. His new affection compensated him for all previous failures and atoned for the humiliation of every past regret.
At that word "affection" he halted himself. Was it affection that he entertained for Lady Dawn? He took a good look at the suspected word and decided that it was. But it was the affection of reverence. In owning this much he qualified his admission by insisting that his affection was totally devoid of passion. Passion in the presence of Lady Dawn looked hysteric and paltry. She inspired a serenity which had nothing to do with the physical. It was the charm of her character that entranced him. Her body scarcely figured in his thoughts; when it did, it failed to stir him. It was no more than the gracious vehicle through which the beauty of her spirit was expressed.
His paramount emotion was gratitude—gratitude that she, who was reputed to be so cold, should so instantly have unveiled herself. There was a star
tling purity in the frankness with which she had bared her spirit to him. It left him awed and touched. He recognized the generosity which had prompted her; she had realized his need of a woman's trust. And so she had withheld nothing that would comfort him. She had made him feel safe, the way a mother does. She had picked up the little boy that lies hidden in the heart of every man, and had folded him in her breast.