"When it means sorrow?"
"It only means sorrow to those you leave. You've paid dearly enough to find nothing but happiness now for the rest of your life. It's written in the sky."
"You're a comforting Chancellor," she was still looking at me calmly, "and I'm already beginning to forget." And gently she laid her hand on the back of my own which rested between us.
My blood bounded with an unreasoning pleasure, yet her movement had been neither temperamental nor sentimental; it was instinctive—one of those honest impulses that knows no sex. Did she realize, by some divine insight, that this frankness, this absence of finical conventions, this whole-hearted camaraderie, would hold me more sternly to my path of duty than anything else she might have done? Did the instinct of her sex whisper that each man's heart, however light and worldly, is the possessor of a trusty loadstone which draws the best of him to a woman's aid when her honor is placed unreservedly into his hands? This speaks, of course, of men and not of human beasts; still, a woman is not put to the peril of looking into the heart of a human beast to discover that he is a beast—she can read it, without glasses, in his face!
"Shall we look over the rest of your estate?" I asked. And I kept the hand until she had been helped up, then released it naturally as we started on the tour of inspection.
We finally came to my pool, and I asked her advice in choosing a nearby spot where I should build a lean-to; since our kitchen site, that until now had been the location of my bailiwick, was by right of conquest hers, a place where she should be able to approach without the precaution of whistling like a plover—a thing she couldn't do, anyway! So we marked a spot and started on, taking some time to encircle the pool that, was rather large and, upon this side, densely fringed with a riot of tropical vines and jungle stuff. Yet, when we had gone but a little way, she stopped, looked vaguely troubled, and said:
"You won't be as near to me here as you were at the kitchen. I was so tired last night that I didn't think very much about those men, because our servants were leading them off. But don't you think it's possible that some of them might wander back here on their way home?"
"There's hardly one chance in a thousand," I assured her.
"I know. But that one chance would be dreadful if—if——" she stopped, and added wistfully: "I would like to feel in the nights that you are nearer to me!"
I turned to look at something else—at anything but her! Yet if my eyes required a subterfuge my heart did not, and it thrilled as if some wild musicians were tugging at its strings making them sound impassioned harmonies. But, even as I stood swayed by the madness of the moment, I felt that a great, an unseen, presence had pinned a decoration upon my honor—not because it had already proved itself, but in order that it might do so.