That voice! . . .
She quivered as though she had been shot and put her hands to her breast. “Dear God!” she said. “Who is it? Who is it?”
“Valentine!” said the voice again.
And in a single movement the Royalist officer uncovered, flung his hat from him, and was at her feet. But even with the previous warning of the voice, even with his tardy uncovering, the shock was too much for a woman who was no longer young. It was as one sees something a long way off that she saw him kneeling there with bent head; but when he raised it, and his face was visible, the blood drummed in her ears. The grey watchers bowed suddenly towards her, the heather began to give way beneath her feet. “Gaston!” she sighed, putting out her hands helplessly like a frightened child, “Gaston—I’m falling! . . .” The heather gave way altogether. . . .
(2)
The cold grey sea on which Valentine had been floating hither and thither began a little to cease its swaying motion. . . . But how curious to be on a sea at all! Yet she could hear it . . . no, it was the wind in the pine avenue at Mirabel. But the pine avenue was nearly all cut down now . . . It was neither, neither. She was lying in strong arms that held her close, against a heart whose pulsations she could hear. It began to come back. That figure by the menhir. O, Christ in Heaven!—but that was a dream!
Yet kisses, not the kisses of a dream, were being laid on her closed eyes, her hair, her brow—though none upon her lips—and with them went passionate words of supplication for forgiveness, and words of a meaning far transcending that . . . words of love, heartbroken words. But he who thus addressed her must have thought her still unconscious when he dared to speak them, for when she opened her eyes and stirred she was very gently laid down out of his grasp upon the heather, and this Royalist officer who was her husband knelt silently there beside her, with his face buried in his hands.
At that relaxing hold Valentine might have thought—a thousand things—but, dizzy and confused though she still was, she had heard, and felt. There was no room for surmises or mistakes.
“Gaston,” she said faintly, lingering on the name. “O Gaston . . . if you are real . . . your arms!”
His hands came down, and she saw his face, ravaged, older, infinitely changed.