"It is my fault, dear," she said softly, "I ought to have told you--I ought to have made you understand. Ned! I am worth no man's love. I shall never----"
He interrupted her with an angry impatient laugh. "But I do understand. It is you who cannot understand that love lives untrammelled by such trivialities. Aura! were I your husband now, you would be a thousand times more dear--the tie between us would be a thousand times more strong----"
"Hush!" she said, with a world of mysterious solemnity in her voice. "If that is true, Ned; if love really can live untrammelled by the body, why should it not live untrammelled by the mind? You want to see me, to hear me, to--to touch me--perhaps! But Ned! There is something that is beyond all this--that is beyond everything--beyond you and me, and yet it is you and I--that is ours now----" Suddenly her tone rose swift and sharp--"Come, Ned! let us forget the rest----is this not enough?"
He looked around him and, even amid such transcendental beauty as was there, shook his head. "I cannot live on air, Aura," he said bitterly. "No man can."
Her face melted into gentle smiles. "There is the lunch-basket," she said.
He turned aside almost with a curse. "It is easy to laugh," he began.
"Is it so easy?" she asked, and once again her voice brought to him that sense of infinite pity, infinite denial. "Then let us laugh, Ned, while we can. Come, let us lose ourselves. Oh Ned! give me one day unspotted by the world, untouched by trivialities, just this one day!"
And as she took his hand, the glamour, not of this world, but of that which lies hidden beyond it, above it, claimed possession of his soul. The blue mist closed in on them. They stood on the floor of heaven with the sky above them.
* * * * *
Down in the hollows with the silken fans of the half-opened beech-leaves overhead, a saffron-coloured azalea dropping its gold upon the blue, the pink campion struggling for a place amongst the blossoms, a tuft of white poet's-narcissus looking up from the pool of water into which a scarce-seen runlet dripped and dropped. What colour! What almost unimaginable beauty.