"I should be sorry if you thought so, Honor."
"Of course, I don't really. Hush now; let me watch all these dear, soft, moony things and be happy, and suffer them to work their will on my mind. I'm very near my reformation, remember. I'm going to be so different afterwards. Just a staid, self-possessed, sensible matron—and as conservative as a cow. Won't there be a peace about the home?"
"Honor!"
"Honour bright. Look at Forde's new thatch! I hate new thatch under the sun, but in the moonlight it is different. His cot looks like some golden-haired, goblin thing that's seen a ghost. How pale the whitewash glares; and the windows throw up the whites of their eyes!"
"Don't talk so much. I'm sure you'll catch cold or something. Now we're going down to valley-level. Lean against me—that's it. This hill grows steeper every time I drive down it, I think."
They crossed Chagford Bridge, where a giant ash fretted the moonlight with tardy foliage still unexpanded; then Myles drove beyond a ruined wool factory, turned to the right, passed Holy Street and the cross in the wall, and finally reached the neighbourhood of Lee Bridge. Here the air above them was dark with many trees and the silence broken by fitful patter of raindrops still falling from young foliage. The green dingles and open spaces glittered with moisture, where the light fell and wove upon them a fabric of frosted radiance touched with jewels, to the crest of the uncurling fern-fronds, and the wide shimmer of the bluebell folk—moon-kissed, as Endymion of old. Pale and wan their purple stretched and floated away and faded dimly, rippling into the darkness; but their scent hung upon the air, like the very breath of sleeping spring.
"Stop here, my love," said Honor. "What a bed for the great light to lie upon! What a silence for the tiny patter of the raindrops to make music in! And thoughts that hide by day—sad-eyed thoughts—peep out now upon all this perfection—hurry from their hiding-places in one's heart and look through one's eyes into these aisles of silver and ebony; and so go back again a little comforted. The glory of it! And if you gaze and listen closer, surely you will see Diana's own white self stealing over the mist of the bluebells, and hear perhaps her unearthly music. Nay, I must talk, Myles, or I shall cry."
"I'm only thinking of all this ice-cold damp dropping upon you out of the trees," he said.
They proceeded, then stopped once again at Honor's urgent desire. The great beech of the proposal stood before her, and she remembered the resting-place between its roots, the words carved upon its trunk. Its arms were fledged with trembling and shining foliage; its upper peaks and crown were full of diaphanous light; its huge bole gleamed like a silver pillar; and spread under the sweep of the lower branches there glimmered a pale sheen of amber where myriads of little leaf-sheafs had fallen and covered the earth as with spun silk.
Great longing to be for one moment alone with the old tree seized upon Honor. Suddenly she yearned to gaze at the throne of her promise to Christopher, to see again those letters his hand had graven upon the bark above. The desire descended in a storm upon her, and shook her so strongly that her voice came, tremulously as bells upon a wind, to utter the quick plan of her imagination.