"Yes—I feel it."
"Do you remember once, long ago—one day when you and I and Cicely went on a picnic to hunt orchids—how we got talking of the one best moment in life—the moment when one wanted most to stop the clock?"
The colour rose in her face while he spoke. It was a long time since he had referred to the early days of their friendship—the days before....
"Yes, I remember," she said.
"And do you remember how we said that it was with most of us as it was with Faust? That the moment one wanted to hold fast to was not, in most lives, the moment of keenest personal happiness, but the other kind—the kind that would have seemed grey and colourless at first: the moment when the meaning of life began to come out from the mists—when one could look out at last over the marsh one had drained?"
A tremor ran through Justine. "It was you who said that," she said, half-smiling.
"But didn't you feel it with me? Don't you now?"
"Yes—I do now," she murmured.
He came close to her, and taking her hands in his, kissed them one after the other.
"Dear," he said, "let us go out and look at the marsh we have drained."