"I think," she said, "that you have trusted most to your good instincts."
He smiled, and she saw that he was deeply touched. "Well, I'm trusting to them now," he responded. "They have led me between two extremes, and it looks as if they had led me into a nest of hornets. I've got them all against me, but it isn't over yet, by Jove! It is a long road that has no turning—"
They had descended the steps together, and walking a little way beyond the drive, they stood in the bright green grass looking up at the clear gold of the sunrise.
"There is a meeting to-night," she said.
"Of the strikers—yes, I may win them. I can generally win people if they let me talk—but the trouble goes deeper than that. It isn't that I can't carry them with me for an hour. It is simply that I can't make any of them see where we are going. It is a question not of loyalty, but of understanding. They can't understand anything except what they want."
"Whether you win or not," she answered, "I am glad that at last I am on your side."
His face lighted. "On my side? Even if it means failure?"
As she looked up at him the sunrise was in her face. The sky was turning slowly to flame-colour, and each dark pointed leaf of the magnolia tree stood out illuminated against a background of fire. "It may be failure, but it is magnificent," she said.
He was smiling down on her from his great height; and while she stood there in that clear golden air, she felt again, as she had felt twice before when she was with him, that beneath the depth of her personal life, in that buried consciousness which belonged to the ages of being, something more real than any actual experience she had ever known was responding to the look in his eyes and the sound of his voice. All that she had missed in life—completeness, perfection—seemed to shine about her for an instant before it passed on into the sunlight. A fancy, nothing more! A fading gleam of some lost wildness of youth! For if she had spoken the thought in her mind while she stood there, she would have said, "Give me what I have never had. Make me what I have never been." But she did not speak it; the serene friendliness of her look did not alter; and the impulse vanished as swiftly as the shadow of a bird in flight.
"I thank you," he answered in a low voice. "I shall remember that."