To Edith it seemed that all the love and joy of this year was gathered into his words and flamed there rose-coloured. She was thrilled and shaken and dazzled with it; it seemed that her body could not bear it, for she trembled and covered her eyes with her hands.
“Ah, stop, stop!” she said; “I am content. Leave it like that.”
She sat there for a moment in silence, and then uncovered her face again.
“You are all round me, Hugh,” she said quietly. “I am so safe.”
Again she paused a moment, and the safety of which she had spoken again seemed so impregnable that she could speak without fear of that which from time to time frightened her, that which Peggy had warned her of, that which the blind one night had tapped to her, that which just now sounded against the windows in the tattoo of the maddened rain. It had lain like a little coiled snake among flowers, but the man who loved her like that she could trust to pull back the flowers and show her, as he must, that there was no snake there, but only a phantom of hers or Peggy’s imagining. For the love that was in the word he had spoken was surely infinitely stronger than any fear.
“And yet I have doubted and wondered,” she said. “I have looked forward ten years or twenty, and seen myself so old, and you so young——”
“Then you doubted me,” said Hugh quickly.
“No, it was not that; it was myself I doubted, though I have doubted less and less, and now at this moment I don’t doubt at all. It—it will be arranged differently somehow.”
Something that had long been fluid in Hugh’s mind, suddenly crystallised.
“Was it Peggy who suggested that to you?” he asked.