“Why, then you understand it all,” she said. “You understand, for instance, why I insist on your having a night in town every week.”
“Yes, I see. Just that you shall get rid of me now and then,” he said.
“Quite right. You’re as sober as—as a commoner, I suppose.”
She moved in her chair, and one end of her necklace slipped from his fingers.
“Am I putting them on for dinner,” he asked, “or am I taking them off for bedtime?”
“Whatever you’re doing, you are being wonderfully clumsy,” said she, as his fingers, warm and soft from his bath, touched the back of her neck.
She was down before him next morning to give him his breakfast, and, waiting for him, strolled out on to the terrace. There had been one of those exquisite early October frosts, and in the air was that ineffable fragrance derived from absence of smell, the odourless odour of frosted dew. The sun was already warm with promise of a hot, cloudless day; but as the heat had not set in motion the weaving of the scents of earth and grass and flowers which would soon decorate and veil the virginal beauty of the morning. Last night, when she and Peter had lingered here in the end of the twilight, the air was not less clear and windless, but it had been charged with all the myriad scents distilled by the hot hours of autumn sun. Now there was a precision, a crystalline quality.... Some such sort of clear sparkle bathed her spirit also: her love basked in some such virginal beauty of young day, flamelike and scentless.
All the evening before, from the time when she met Peter by the lake, she, body and soul and spirit, had been rising towards some new peak of passion, and the true topmost summit seemed to her now to be where she stood in this cool brightness, able to see that the upward path which led here was below her. They had dined after Peter had clasped her necklace for her; there had been the usual piquet for her and Mr. Mainwaring, and for the latter a triumphant pæan of achievement over some effect of lightning in the second cartoon, which positively, as he stood aside as artist and became spectator, appalled him, and before they settled down to their cards he must needs conduct them to the masterpiece in question, and let them also feel the cold clutch of fear.
But whatever Mr. Mainwaring did or said, whatever her mother, it was Peter whom, in this rising tide of flame and self-surrender, Silvia watched, no longer looking for those signs of tenderness and affection which (owlish) she had missed, but in the rapturous contemplation of them. Often she had seen him charming to her mother and to his own father; but always, so she had thought, she could detect in him politeness and amenity, the controlling hand of breeding, the practice of pleasant behaviour. But this evening there had been no “behaviour” about him at all, he had been radiant with them both, divinely natural.... He had sat next Mrs. Wardour on the sofa, as the piquet was in progress, and entertained her with ludicrous but hopelessly recognizable caricatures of her and his father over their cards; he had held a skein of her wool, he had mixed her hot water and lemon juice for her. All these things he had often done before, and they were all trivial enough.... He was the same with his father, looking over his hand when so bidden, dutifully observing exactly how to play that puzzling game; eager to anticipate his wants, chaffing him sometimes, behaving to him—this again was the wrong word—being to him, rather, all that his own sonship implied, fulfilling in every word and gesture the welcome which he had given to the suggestion of his remaining with them till they went to London. And all that was “the world’s side” which anyone might see, and behind it in “lights and darks undreamed of” was that other aspect and reality of him, which was hers alone.... She was already in bed when she heard him, after his smoking-room chat with his father, come into his room, and presently, after tapping on her door, he looked in, coatless and shoeless. She pretended—in parody of what happened two nights before—to be asleep, and between her eyelids, nearly closed, she saw a broad smile overspread his face.
“I don’t believe a single word of it,” he remarked.