His chest was heaving, and as his eyes searched her face he cried, "Thank God," and gathered her up in his arms. She nestled there without a word.
They crossed the gorge and scattered the brands of their watch-fire, and walked on down to the cove. Suddenly Lassie came bounding toward them uttering short, excited barks. They quickened their pace, and as they came in sight of the beach discovered the object of her alarm. Against a small promontory, lying on one side, was the ship they had sighted the evening before. It was a hopeless wreck, and had borne to them no living thing. Yet it had served its purpose. It had revealed their love for each other, and told them that they had hoped against a second deluge in vain.
XIV
The truth of truths is love.
Bailey.
As Adam went about his morning's work he was filled with a sense of gladness, an exaltation of life he had never known before. He stretched out his arms, as if to let all the glory of the earth meet the profounder splendor of his soul. As he walked down the garden path he looked with affection at the flowers they had planted together. But for the absurdity of it, he could have woven a chaplet of them and worn it. But the world had reached that height of civilization where the symbol of the glad and living thing was too emotional; always and everywhere we preferred the dead thing, the skin of the seal, the shroud of the silkworm, the straw that was left after the flowers were gone; and Adam was still civilized.
He accepted his happiness without a question. It was too real, too keen, too great a revelation for him to stop to analyze it. He knew it in every pulsation of his heart, in every imagination of his mind, and with the quickened senses of the lover he perceived that Robin's feelings differed from his own. For a year he had been lost in introspection; now they seemed to have changed places, and she grew silent and almost reserved.
"What is it, dear?" he said. "No, don't try to evade an answer. We must not stop being frank with each other now."
She did not reply at once, and when she did her voice was so low that he had to stoop to catch the words. "Do you think you do love me as fully as you might have loved some one else, younger and happier than I, better fitted to you? It doesn't seem as if you could; you never did in the old days, you never even thought of it."
Adam laughed lightly. "I beg of you spare me, for this isn't 'so sudden' at all." Then seeing that her mood forbade jest, he went on seriously: "Really, I mean it. It's true I never made you pretty speeches in the old days, nor stopped to consider whether I might have done so had things been different; but then I never made pretty speeches to any one. From the very beginning I have taken you as a matter of course. It always seemed as if we had known each other from the very first. You entered into my plans as if you had known them as you might if we had gone to the same little red schoolhouse. I wish we had! I'm jealous of the years when I didn't know you."
"But a whole year," she said doubtfully. "Are you sure it isn't just loneliness and propinquity?"