“Oh! I didn’t know you could do that,” she said. “That’s much nicer.”
He returned and seated himself beside her, and leaned from the broad window with his face close to hers. She touched his cheek with her own caressingly.
“Night on the veld,” she whispered,—“and just we two alone—watching. All those other people... they don’t count. I love it—don’t you? Do you notice the scents? They are stronger than in the daytime. What is it. I can smell as we go along? Something... it’s like heliotrope.”
“The night convolvulus,” he answered. “The veld is smothered with it in places. All the best scents in Africa are night scents. The night is the best time of all.”
“Yes; it’s the best time,” she agreed. “A night like this! ... Isn’t it perfect? I am alive as I have never felt before. It’s as though all my senses were quickened. I didn’t know it was possible to enjoy so intensely. I wish this could last for ever... I wish that I might fall asleep presently, and wake no more... Don’t let us talk... Let us watch together—like this,—and just feel...”
And so they remained, this man and woman who loved hopelessly, silent in the darkened carriage, with faces pressed close against each other,—intent on one another to the exclusion of every other thought,—clinging together in a mute sympathy, and a love which had gone beyond utterance, got above and outside ordinary physical passion, and stood for what it was,—the supreme thing in their lives,—the best that life had offered them, which neither separation nor sorrow could filch from their possession.
And the train rushed on through the clear, luminous night that, warm still and fragrant with the hundred different scents of the Karroo, never darkened beyond a twilight duskiness, in which the veld showed darkly defined against the deepening purple of the sky, where a young moon rode like a white sickle amid the countless stars.