"Good luck!" he cried. "I'd lost half myself the moment you disappeared, and had made up my mind to mourn unobtrusively till you came back to me. Why hasn't outraged Nature sent a thunderbolt to suppress Courteney Clack? I might have known that desperate surgeon would have prescribed amputation upon most shadowy excuse."
"He has been very busy."
"And done absolutely the right thing, viewed from standpoint of forestry; which makes it impossible to say what one feels. But forget all that. Home we won't go yet. Come and see the sunset."
A promise of great aerial splendours filled the sky as the day waned, and Yeoland, to whom such spectacles were precious as formerly, hastened upwards to the high lands with his wife by his side.
Together they passed through the wood of pines above Godleigh, then, pursuing their way onwards, the man caught a shadow of sobriety from Honor, being quick at all times to note the colour of her thoughts. The fact that she was sad called for no wonder where they then stood, for now in her eyes were mirrored Bear Down's wind-worn sycamores, ripe thatches, whitewashed farm-buildings, and grey walls. The relinquished home of her forefathers lay there, and she had now come from visiting the last of her line. This Christopher supposed, and so understood her demeanour.
Overhead a splendid turmoil of gloom and fire waxed heavenwide, where wind and cloud and sinking sun laboured magnificently together.
"I know every strand in your dear thoughts, love; I could write the very sequence of them, and take them down in shorthand from your eyes."
She smiled at him. That favourite jest of his had been nearly true until now. Henceforth it could be true no more. It was not the picture of home and the thirsty, shorn grass lands spread around it that made her soul sink so low. Even Christopher henceforth was outside the last sanctuary of her heart, and must so remain. There had come a new sorrow of sorrows, to be hidden even from her second self—a grief not to be shared by him, a legacy of tears whose secret fountains he must never find.
She held his hand like a child, and something of her woe passed into him; then he knew that she was very sad, and suspected that her unhappiness had source in deeper things than the renewed spectacle of her home. He instantly fell into sympathy; but it was only a little deeper than that of an artist. What she felt now—walking where Myles Stapledon had so often walked—he could readily conceive; and it made him sad also, with a gentle, æsthetic melancholy that just fell short of pain. For him and for Honor he believed that a future of delicate happiness was spread. These clouds were natural, inevitable; but they scarcely obscured the blue. So he argued, ignorant of that anguish in the mind of his wife. For her the anticipated summer of peace appeared not possible. Now her future stretched before her—ghost-haunted in sober truth. Here was such a mournful twilight as broods over all personifications of highest grief; for her, as for those Titan figures—each an incarnate agony—who pace the aisles of olden drama, there could be no removal into the day-spring of hope, no departure into any night of indifference. Only an endless dusk of sorrow awaited her. Western light was upon her face; but not the glory of evening, nor yet the whole pageant of the sun's passing, could pierce the darkness of her heart.
They stood upon Scor Hill above the Moor; and Christopher spoke—