“Between you and me everything matters.”
“Of course!” She felt the unperceiving sweetness of his smile. “That’s why,” he went on, “‘everything,’ for me, is here and now: on this bench, between you and me.”
She caught at the phrase. “That’s what I meant: it’s here and now; we can’t get away from it.”
“Get away from it? Do you want to? again?”
Her heart was beating unsteadily. Something in her, fitfully and with reluctance, struggled to free itself, but the warmth of his nearness penetrated every sense as the sunlight steeped the landscape. Then, suddenly, she felt that she wanted no less than the whole of her happiness.
“‘Again’? But wasn’t it you, the last time——?”
She paused, the tremor in her of Psyche holding up the lamp. But in the interrogative light of her pause her companion’s features underwent no change.
“The last time? Last spring? But it was you who—for the best of reasons, as you’ve told me—turned me back from your very door last spring!”
She saw that he was good-humouredly ready to “thresh out,” for her sentimental satisfaction, a question which, for his own, Time had so conclusively dealt with; and the sense of his readiness reassured her.
“I wrote as soon as I could,” she rejoined. “I explained the delay and asked you to come. And you never even answered my letter.”