"Patch and I," he said, "have at least one afternoon a week. As long as I'm back in time to lay the table…."
A moment later he was stepping along by her side.
It had not occurred to him to ask what "her window" might be. If she had offered to show him the mouth of hell, he would have assented as blindly. Whither he went and what he saw did not matter at all, so he was to be in her company. All the same, his instinct pulled him by the sleeve. Hazily he reflected that to retrace such steps as you have taken along the path of Love is a bad business, and that the farther you have elected to venture, so much the more distressing must be your return. And he would have to return. In the absence of a miracle, that journey could not be avoided. For an instant the spectre of Reckoning leaned out of the future…. Then Patch flushed a stray pig, and Valerie laughed joyously, and—the shadow was gone. Cost what it might, Anthony determined to pluck the promise of the afternoon with an unsparing hand.
He had walked in the direction of Bell Hammer for the same reason that had caused Valerie French to bend her young steps towards Hawthorne. Each drew the other magnetically. It was not at all strange, therefore, that they should have met. Neither, since the attraction was mutual, is it surprising that the effect of each other's company was exhilarating to a degree. Together, they were at the very top of their bent. If the man trod upon air, the maid was glowing. His lady's breath sweetened the smell of autumn; the brush of her lord's jacket made the blood pelt through her veins. Grey eyes shone with the light that blue eyes kindled. Each found the other's voice full of rare melody—music to which their pulses danced in a fierce harmony. The world was all glorious….
Here was no making of love, but something finer—nothing less, indeed, than the jewel natural, uncut, unworked, unpolished, blazing out of a twofold crown that sat, yoke-like, upon their heads for all to see. Since, however, they met no one, the diadem was unobserved….
So Jack and Jill passed with full hearts by yellow lanes into the red-gold woods, and presently along a bridle-path that curled mysteriously into a great sunlit shoulder of forest, where the driven leaves fussed over their footsteps, and the miniature roar of a toy waterfall strove to make itself heard above the swish and crackle of the carpet the trees had laid.
"I'll tell you one thing I've learned," said Lyveden.
"What?" said Valerie.
"That what you do doesn't matter half as much as who you do it with. I found that out in the Army. The work didn't matter. The discomfort, the food, didn't count—comparatively. It was the company you had to keep that made the difference."
"'Better is a dinner of herbs,'" quoted Valerie.