“But you have chosen the right day, the right place!” she cried. The vanishing of the dread that he might not tell her had almost irradiated her. “The . . . the past—see, it can be forgotten, as a pebble would be, cast into those great waters . . . and that there is no pain now—I love him, too. Will not that convince you, my husband?”
Perhaps it did. He bowed his forehead silently upon her hands as he held them.
“But as for guessing,” she went on, “—O Gaston, my very dear, it is over now—as for guessing, the first moment that I saw him, lying in the garden at Mirabel, I was startled . . . but I thought it was imagination. And I grew so fond of him in those few days, innocent and gallant as he was. Yet I put the idea away at once because . . . because he had not your eyes . . . and now, after all . . .” She stopped; speech was suddenly failing her. “O Gaston,” she said in a breaking whisper, “Gaston, if only he had mine!”
And pulling her hands away she put them before her own face, weeping.
“My darling, my darling!” he cried, and strained her in his arms, saying no more than that, beyond speech indeed himself, pierced once more by the memory of his own words at their parting, which came back even now to stab him. But as, with her face covered, she wept upon his heart, he knew that it was not of his unworthy reproach that she was thinking. Hers was a deeper and more mysterious pain. It seemed so to throb through her as he held her, there on the sandy shore, that the very waves were full of it; and he could do nothing save hold her more tenderly still, and kiss the yet beautiful hair.
After a little she ceased to sob, and dried her eyes.
“Only one thing more,” she said unsteadily. “Does Roland know?”
“I gave my word to his grandfather that I would not tell him before he was one-and-twenty. I have tried to keep it in the spirit as well as in the letter. I do not think he guesses. What others may guess I do not know.”
“It is plain,” said Valentine, “that he worships you. But they all do that, those young men—and with reason.”
They were still standing at the edge of the waves when she put the seal on her forgiveness. For she said, looking at him with her clear eyes, “Gaston, when I see him and speak with him I am glad that he is your son!”