"Oh, my love!" he said, "what have I done to deserve any part of you? It is as you wish; how can you doubt it? How can I do otherwise?"
She smiled at him.
"But why do you do as I wish, Toby?" she asked. "It must not be because I want you to."
Toby was much moved; never before had the wonder and splendour of love so held him.
"Oh, my beloved," he said, "it is because God has ordained that all you wish is right; I can give you no other reason."
Dusk began to fall layer on layer over the sky. In the west the sunken sun still illuminated a fleece of crimson cloud that hovered above it, and round them the gray, long English twilight grew more solemn and intense. The outlines of shadows melted and faded into the neutral tint of night, and from the house behind, and from the cottages that clustered together across the river, lights began to twinkle, and the wheeling points of remotest heaven were lit overhead. The crimson in the west died into the velvet blue of the sky, and in the east the horizon was dove-coloured with the imminent moon-rise. And as the two walked they spoke together, as they had not spoken before, of the dear event which June should bring.
To Lily, the happiness which, please God, should be hers lay in depths too abysmal for thought to plumb; and Toby for the first time fully understood how compassion, and no other feeling, had whole possession of her soul, when she had been with Kit and Jack all that terrible day, hardly more than a week ago. For that which had been to Kit a thing to dread was to the other the crown of her life, and that the experience to herself so blessed could be anything different to another woman called for pure pity. And other feelings—amazement, horror, shame—were trivial and superficial compared to that; it swept them utterly out of possibility of existence. The woman, the mother, had been between them a bond insoluble.
And Kit, so Toby thought, had felt something of this. For the five days that had followed, he himself had seen almost nothing of his wife; she had been all day at the house in Park Lane, and had twice slept there. Kit in the weakness and exhaustion of those days had held on, as if to a rock, to the sweet strength and womanliness of the other; that was the force that pulled her back to life.
That evening when they went in, Lily found waiting for her a letter from Jack, saying that the doctor had sanctioned Kit's being moved in a week's time, provided she went on as well as she was doing, and that they proposed to come down to Goring. One condition, however, Jack made himself, that Lily should telegraph quite candidly (he trusted her for this) whether she and Toby would rather they did not come. She laughed as she read the note, and sent her answer without even consulting Toby.