She rose to her feet. He saw that she supported herself for a moment with one hand still on the bench rail. He took her other hand within his own and drew her arm through his arm.
It was the close of the day. The sun, setting, touched the hills with evening, and below the distant Towers great copses of oak lay like islands on the mirrored landscape. They walked from the bench slowly together. "Just a little help for the start," he murmured playfully as he kept her at his side. "The path is a new one. I shall make it very easy for your feet."
CHAPTER XXVII
"I hope you rested well after your excitement," said Kimberly to Alice, laughing reassuringly as he asked. It was the day following their parting at the golf grounds. He had driven over to Cedar Lodge and found Alice in the garden waiting for Dolly. The two crossed the terrace to a sheltered corner of the garden overlooking the bay where they could be alone. After Alice had seated herself Kimberly repeated his question.
She regarded him long and thoughtfully as she answered, and with a sadness that was unexpected: "I did not rest at all. I do not even yet understand--perhaps I never shall--why I let you talk to me in that wild, wild way. But if I did not rest last night, I thought. I am to blame--I know that--as much as you are. Don't tell me. I am as much to blame as you are. But this cannot go on."
His eyes were upon her hands as they lay across flowers in her lap. He took a spray from her while she spoke and bent his look upon it. She was all in white and he loved to see her in white. In it she fulfilled to him a dream of womanhood. "I ought to ask you what you mean when you say and think these fearful things," she went on, waiting for him to lift his eyes. "I ought to ask you; but you do not care what it means, at least as far as you are concerned. And you never ask yourself what it means as far as I am concerned."
He replied with no hesitation. "I began asking myself that question almost the first time I ever saw you. I have asked myself nothing else ever since. It means for both of us exactly the same thing; for you, everything you can ask that I can give you; for me, everything I can give you that you can ask."
"If there were no gulf between us--but there is. And even if what you say were true, you can see how impossible it would be for me to say those words back to you."
He looked at the spray. "Quite true; you cannot. But I shall ask so little--less of you than of any woman in the world. And you will give only what you can, and when you can. And you alone are to be the judge of what you can give and when, until our difficulties are worked out.
"I shall only show you now that I can be patient. I never have been--I have confessed to that. Now I am going to the test. Meantime, you don't realize, Alice, quite, how young you are, do you? Nor how much in earnest I am. Let us turn to that for a while."