How could it be serious? What a fool she must be if she thought it was! It was an idle flirtation with him, a married man, alone on his holidays, amusing himself with the most likely girl that offered herself. Yet never with all her astuteness would Jane have considered that Mary was the most likely. Always Mary had seemed, except for her games, insensible to the attractions of men. What had come over her? Fanny was the one whom men with inclination for harmless passing of their time had singled out for semi-serious interchange of ideas. Fanny was romantic. Men liked that when it did not become too serious to interfere with the free pursuit of their enjoyments.
But this, as she watched them there through her curtain of heather, looked more romantic than anything she could ever have imagined about Fanny. Had they been strangers and had she come across them thus she would have felt herself in the presence of something not meant for her to see and, passing them by, she would have given all impression of looking the other way, however covertly she might have observed.
Yet here it was her own sister and, to herself, calling it her duty, she watched them both with every sense stretched forth to clutch each sign or movement that might give evidence to her impulsive mind how far the thing had gone between them.
She was not long in learning the utmost truth. After a long silence, Liddiard slipped down off the gate and stood in the bracken looking directly into Mary's eyes. Jane felt that look. She held her breath as it pierced into her own eyes. Then, when he laid his hands upon Mary's shoulders and for an instant held her so as he spoke, Jane swallowed in her throat and against the roots of heather felt her heart beating like a trapped bird in her breast.
At that distance, more sure than Mary, she knew what was going to happen. More sure than either of them, she knew. When suddenly, as though some leaping power had swept upon him unexpectedly, he took her in his arms and their heads were one together, linked with his kisses, Jane had known of it more surely than he.
Feeling those kisses on her own lips, on her eyes, her throat, and like hammers beating in her heart, Jane buried her face in the heather but did not know that she moaned with pain.
When she looked up, they had gone.
VII
If those kisses were hurtful to Jane, they were a sublime realization to Mary. In the rush of them as they pressed against her lips, she felt a consummation of all those forces of life which, with the Bridnorth coach, had so often called to her as it came and passed with its message out of the world.
Rightly or wrongly in the accepted standards of morality, Mary felt such completed justification in those moments as to be sensitive of the surging intentions of life triumphing within her. This, she knew then, was the fullness of meaning in a woman's life. If it were pleasure, it was not the pleasure of sensation; not even the pleasure of the promise of gratification. None of the joys of amorous delay were mingled in those kisses for her.