“I hope nothing has happened?” she asked anxiously.
Mrs. Wilkins looked at her a moment, and laughed. “How funny,” she said, kissing her.
“What is funny?” asked Mrs. Arbuthnot, her face clearing because Mrs. Wilkins laughed.
“We are. This is. Everything. It’s all so wonderful. It’s so funny and so adorable that we should be in it. I daresay when we finally reach heaven—the one they talk about so much—we shan’t find it a bit more beautiful.”
Mrs. Arbuthnot relaxed to smiling security again. “Isn’t it divine?” she said.
“Were you ever, ever in your life so happy?” asked Mrs. Wilkins, catching her by the arm.
“No,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot. Nor had she been; not ever; not even in her first love-days with Frederick. Because always pain had been close at hand in that other happiness, ready to torture with doubts, to torture even with the very excess of her love; while this was the simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is.
“Let’s go and look at that tree close,” said Mrs. Wilkins. “I don’t believe it can only be a tree.”
And arm in arm they went along the hall, and their husbands would not have known them their faces were so young with eagerness, and together they stood at the open window, and when their eyes, having feasted on the marvellous pink thing, wandered farther among the beauties of the garden, they saw sitting on the low wall at the east edge of it, gazing out over the bay, her feet in lilies, Lady Caroline.
They were astonished. They said nothing in their astonishment, but stood quite still, arm in arm, staring down at her.