She turned away from him as she spoke, and leant against the bookcase behind her table. It was a long time before he moved, and then, still with back turned, she heard him approach her, and he took her hand and kissed it.
"I love and I honour you," he said.
Jeannie gave one immense sigh.
"Oh, Tom," she said, "you are a man!"
"It is of your making, then," said he.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Easter fell late next year, but spring had come early, and had behaved with unusual sweetness and constancy, for from the middle of March to mid-April there had been a series of days from which winter had definitely departed. In most years April produces two or three west-wind days of enervating and languorous heat, but then recollects itself and peppers the confiding Englishman with hail and snow, blown as out of a pea-shooter from the northeast, just to remind him that if he thinks that summer is going to begin just yet he is woefully mistaken. But this year the succession of warm days had been so uninterrupted that Lady Nottingham had made the prodigious experiment of asking a few people down to Bray for a week-end party at Easter itself.
She was conscious of her amazing temerity, for she knew well that anything might happen; that the river, instead of being at the bottom of the garden, might so change its mind about their relative positions that in a few hours the garden would be at the bottom of the river, or, again, this bungalow of a house might be riddled and pierced with arctic blasts.
But, in spite of these depressing possibilities, she particularly wanted to have a few, a very few, people down for that Sunday. They had all a special connection with Bray. Things had happened there before, and it was a party of healed memories that was to gather there. If, after all, the weather turned out to be hopelessly unpropitious, they could all sit in a ring round the fire, holding each other's hands. She felt sure they would like to do that. Probably there would be a great many tête-à-têtes in various corners, or, if it were warm, in various punts. But she felt sure that they would all hold hands in the intervals of these.
Jeannie and Victor had been married in the autumn, and since then they had practically disappeared, surrounded by a glow of their own happiness. They had sunk below the horizon, but from the horizon there had, so to speak, come up a brilliant illumination like an aurora borealis.