I will go away—I will go away to the sea and wait there for you. You are right, as always. If I am not to see you it is less intolerable not to be near you. I hardly dare to read in your letter what I wish you could have meant me to read. But I warn you that when once I have you again I shall never let you go.
She had not answered that, though she had written every day, little, friendly, intimate notes, telling him of every day's little happenings and what were to be the happenings of the morrow. She told him, at last, that the aunt was really going, and when. She wrote:
The aunts are going to Scotland and I shall be left to see Aunt Alice off, and then, when she is gone, I will write and make an assignation with my friend and comrade, and we will go back to the good, green country. It won't be all different, will it? People meet again after years and don't recognize each other. I suppose they have been changing, changing a little bit every day. Do you think we shall have changed—contrariwise? You one way and I the other, I mean, so that when we do meet we sha'n't be the same?
The last letter of all was the shortest. "Monday," it said at the top of its page, and then:
Auntie leaves Folkestone to-morrow by the morning boat. I will let you know where to find me. Would Thursday suit you, in the afternoon?
He had felt no doubt as to that. Thursday would not suit him—but Tuesday would—and not the afternoon, but the morning. Had she really thought that he would wait two days?
And now, lying on the turf, he read her letters through and laid his face down on the last and dreamed a little, with closed eyes; and when he lifted his head again the mist had grown thin as a bridal veil and the sun was plain to be seen, showing a golden face above the sea, where a million points of light gleamed like tinsel through a curtain of gossamer. The air was warmer, the scent of the wild thyme sweeter and stronger, and overhead, in the gray that was growing every moment clearer and bluer, the skylarks were singing again.
"I knew," said Edward, as he went down toward the town where the smoke of the newly lighted fires rose straight from the chimneys—"I knew it couldn't have the heart not to be fine, on this day of all days."
He went back to his hotel and inspected once more certain of the purchases he had made since her decree had banished him from London. Resisting a momentary impulse toward asceticism in the matter of breakfast, as an outward and visible testimony to the unimportance of material things at such a time as this, he found himself at the other end of the pendulum's swing, ordering just such a meal as he would have ordered had she been with him, and ate his grape-fruit and omelette and delicately browned fish with thoughtful appreciation, making of them a banquet in her honor. He toasted her in the coffee, and, as he ate, romance insisted that it was not himself, but her man, whom he was treating to that perfectly served breakfast; and common sense added, "Yes, and no man's at his best if he's hungry." Before he reached the marmalade he had come to regard that impulse to tea and toast as a man might regard a vanished temptation to alcoholic excess.
"A hungry man's only half a man—the bad-tempered half," he said, lighting his first cigarette, and strolling out into the sunny inn-yard, where a hostler with a straw in his mouth was busy with a bucket of water and a horse's legs; a pleasanter man, Edward thought, than the other man there, busy with oil and petrol and cotton-waste and a very new motor-car.