"She did, my Lady. It was after she had read them that she ordered the car."
"Then that's it." Tabs dismissed the subject as unworthy of further discussing. "She went to Gloucester to hurry off a telegram of congratulation. Braithwaite's had a stroke of luck."
"If that is all," Lady Dawn smiled mischievously, "I wonder that she didn't come back in the car. A telegram can be dispatched in five minutes."
From then on, the threat of Terry's return hung over them, urging them to make the most of their respite. Everything that had started between them was so new and uncertain. No time-limit had been set to Tabs' visit; his original reason for coming to Dawn Castle was exhausted. There was no sufficiently plausible excuse for prolonging his stay in the village longer. A little absence, a little carelessness of forgetting, a few new interests and who
could say but that this sudden need of each other, which had rushed them together with such compelling impulse, might not subside as unaccountably as it had occurred. In both their hearts this dread was present—this distrust of the permanency of their emotions. If they parted, they might meet again to find the magic irrecoverable.
After lunch they retired to the room in the turret. She chose her favorite chair by the window and sat there sewing, with her work-basket at her feet. He sat opposite, watching the busy occupation of her hands. He noticed that many of the garments which she mended belonged to the small boy whom he had seen in the rose-garden.
She looked up. "I always do everything for Eric."
It was later, when tea was being served, that the small boy himself peered in on them. Tabs caught his jealous eyes peering round the doorway. "Won't you come and talk to me?"
But the child ran away, despite his mother's coaxings, and refused to divulge his place of hiding.
She apologized. "He's not quite eight yet—the only sweetheart I have." Later she said, "I've been thinking of what we talked last night—I mean his father. Would it be too far-fetched to believe that it was really he and not your imagination, that piloted us together?"