“Yes, Helen,” said he.
They stood there looking at each other, with hands still clasped, and the steadfast love which had illuminated the sky above her came swiftly down the stairs of heaven and shone on them. And her lips smiled, and the light of that love was in her eyes as she kissed him.
“Robin gave himself,” she said. “We have to give him, too.”
“Can you do that, Helen?” he asked. “I can’t.”
“We must learn to,” said she.
He was silent a moment.
“There are no details yet,” he said. “Just the bare news was sent me. I thought I would tell you myself.”
“That was good of you,” she said. “I always dreaded a telegram, but I didn’t dread you.”
For that moment they came together more closely than their love of Robin had ever yet brought them.... More clearly than anything, more clearly even than the memory of her last day with him, she remembered now, how twenty years ago she stood with her husband here, and told him that she was with child. And through the estrangements, the unfaithfulness, and all the sequel of the marriage that had so soon been void of honour and of love, there shone, as through rent mists, the gold of a gathered harvest.
Together thus they walked back to the house. So short a time had elapsed since she left Jaye’s bath-chair, that it had still not arrived at the end of the terrace. The post had come in, and there was a pile of letters for her in the hall. The topmost of them was unstamped and addressed in pencil. “From Robin,” she said, and she took it up as she would have taken up some sacred thing....