Perhaps that strong, self-contained nature could never have fully sounded the depths of its own surrender, without those hours of uncertainty, when nothing stood between her and the man she loved, but the possibility that her telegram would fail to reach him; that he would carry out his dangerous flight; that disaster and death would overtake him and wrest him from her, and that he would die—Guy Chelsea would die—without ever knowing of the cup of bliss she was now ready, with utterly loving hand, to hold to his lips.
Having sent her message, there was nothing more she could do, and the burden of inaction seemed almost too great a weight to carry, during the hours which must elapse, before his coming could turn uncertainty into assurance; restlessness, into peace.
It did not occur to her, as a possibility, that Guy Chelsea would elect to fly, after receiving her request. She knew her slightest wish would be law to the Boy's tender loyalty; and though he knew nothing of her cause for anxiety, nor of the complete change of circumstances since he left her, not forty-eight hours before, she felt sure he would not fly; she felt certain he would come—if—if the message reached him in time.
At two o'clock it came to her, with overwhelming certainty, that her message had not reached him, and that he had started on his flight. She seemed to see the great wings mounting—mounting; then skimming over the sea. She almost heard the hum he had so often described—the hum of the giant insect on which the bird-man flew.
Her own Little Boy Blue was flying through space. O God, what might not any minute be bringing! He had said: "One never expects those things to happen, and when they do happen, it's over so quickly that there is no time for expectation." Was it happening now? Was it going to be over so quickly, that her cup of bliss would be dashed from her lips untasted? Was she to lose her all, because of a cross-current or a twisted wire?
She was walking up and down the garden now, and paused beside the chair in which she had sat when he had said, only seven days ago: "It was always you I wanted; not your niece. Good heavens! How can you have thought it was Mollie, when it was you—you—just only you, all the time?" And she, half-laughing at him, had asked: "Is this a proposal?"
"My ALL," she said. "Oh, Boy dear, my ALL. If I lose you, I lose my ALL."
She walked on slowly, moving to the repetition of those words. It seemed a comfort to repeat the great fact that, at last, he was this to her. Surely it would reach him, by some sort of wireless telegraphy through space. Surely it would control cross-currents, keep propellers acting as they should; steering-gear from twisting.
"O God, he is my ALL—he is my ALL!"