To Edward, lying at his long length on the short turf and looking out to the opalescent mist that hid the sea, it was not possible to believe that this day of all days could be anything but very good or very bad. The elements must be for him or against him, must help or hinder. That they could be indifferent was unthinkable.
For this was the day of days, come, at last, after weeks of a waiting that had not been patient, the day when he should, indeed, and not in dreams, see her again.
This was the thought, insistent, even in his sleep, that had at last broken up that sleep, as a trickle of water breaks up the embankment of a reservoir, letting out the deep floods inclosed by that barrier, the deep flood of pent-up longing which sleep could no longer restrain from consciousness.
So he had got up and come out to look over the sea and think of her.
Her letters made a bulge in his coat pocket; he pulled them out—a fat little bundle secured by an elastic band—and he read:
It is strange that you should have been expecting to see me just then, because just then I really had come as far as the door of your house—only everything was dark except for a murky star of gas that had been turned down in the hall. So I told myself that you weren't there, and I didn't want to be told so by any one else, and I went home. I like your letter; I like it very, very much, but it makes me see how stupid and selfish I have been to let you stay in London in the summer-time, waiting all the time for some one who never comes. And I want you to go away, right into the country, and I'll write to you as soon as Aunt Alice goes abroad. She is very, very much better. It won't be long now. A week, perhaps? Two weeks? Go away where it is green and glorious, and I shall think of you all the time and wish myself where you are.
At first when I read your letter I thought that I must see you just once before you go away. But now I see that I won't see you. If I were to see you it would not really make anything any easier. And nothing is very easy, as it is. You understand, don't you?
He hoped he did understand. If he understood, her letter meant the beginning of the end of the incredible honeymoon. For he dared to read the letter as he desired to read it, and where she had written, "If I were to see you it would not really make anything easier, and nothing is very easy," he had read, "If I were to see you I should find it too hard to part from you again," and next moment cursed himself for a presumptuous fool. What was he that the gods should now and thus renew to him an assurance that had once been his for a few magic hours, in the wild night-rush of a London-bound train, when the air was scented with the roses of dreams and the lady of all dreams slept upon his shoulder? For in those long and lonely days, in his London lodging, that assurance had dwindled, shriveled, faded to a maddening incertitude; the whole splendid pageant of his days had faded and shrunk to the pale substance of a vision.
Presumptuous or not, foolish or wise, the meaning which her letter might have revived his spirit, as the sweet air of dawn revives a man who comes out of a darkened prison to meet the waxing light and the first twitter of the newly awakened birds.
He had written: