“But it was lovely,” he answered in the same key. “The clouds and the storms didn’t matter. Those were three—three great weeks.”
He ended lamely but they were the best words he could get, trying to say something that would keep her there, trying to see her through the vaporous light. She bent over the railing looking for another rose, but there were no more within her reach and she gave the short, nervous laugh she had given before and turned her eyes on him again. Then he realized that she was agitated. The knowledge augmented his own perturbation and for a moment he did not trust himself to speak. He gazed at her fixedly, the look of a lover, and was not conscious that she wavered under it, till she suddenly drew a quick breath, turned her head sidewise, and said, with an effort at naturalness,
“Well, I must go in. The roses are all picked and papa’ll be wondering where I am.”
It seemed to Dominick just then that he could not lose her. She must stay a moment longer. Urgency that was imploring was in his voice as he said,
“Don’t go! don’t go! Stay just one moment longer! Can’t you come down and talk for a minute? Come part of the way down. I want to speak to you for a little bit longer. It may be months before I see you again.”
She listened, wavered, and was won over. Without answer she turned from the shadow of the porch into the light on the top of the steps, and from there slowly descended, her skirt gathered in one hand, and the other touching the baluster. She was in black and from its dead density her arms, bare to the elbow, shone as white as the arms of a marble woman. The baluster ended in a lion crouching in sleep on a slab of stone, and she paused here and Dominick went up the few steps from the street to meet her. With the sleeping lion between them they looked at each other with troubled eyes.
The moonlight seemed to have drawn from the meeting the artificialities of worldly expression, which in the sensible, familiar daylight would have placed it on the footing of a casual, to-be-expected encounter. The sun beating down on lovers beats some of their sentimental transports out of them. Now in this mystic, beautifying luminosity, the acquired point of view, the regard for the accepted conventions of every-day seemed to have receded to a great distance, to be thin, forgotten things that had nothing to do with real life. For a moment Berny ceased to be a living presence, standing with a flaming sword between them. They almost forgot her. The memory that pressed upon them was that of their last meeting. It shone in their eyes and trembled on their lips. The sleeping lion that separated them was a singularly appropriate symbol.
Low-voiced and half-spoken sentences belonged to this romantic moment. The moonlit night around them was still and empty, but Dominick spoke as though other ears than hers were listening:
“I’ve wanted so to see you. I came by to-night hoping that perhaps I could catch a glimpse of your shadow on the curtain. I didn’t expect anything like this.”
He stopped, looking at her, and not listening to the few words of her answer.