He certainly wished no change whatever, if it could be avoided. Lorraine meant everything to him just then, and he could not but know how much his companionship and affection had come to mean to her.
So the next day he paid his customary visit, and talked as usual of many things, but said no word of what had passed the previous night.
Lorraine’s room was full of violets and snowdrops, cushions of them on every side, in lovely array. He moved about looking at them, and she watched him from a low chair by the fire, clad in some new spring gown of an exquisite mauve shade, that seemed to tone with the violet-bedecked room.
It gave her dark eyes something of a violet tint, and her hands looked as white and delicate as the snowdrops. Moving about from mass of blossoms, Alymer, glancing at her, thought she looked younger and lovelier than ever.
“You have a spring air about you,” he said, “and all the room seems full of spring. There is something about it all I like better than the lilies and roses and malmaisons usually making a display.”
“I sent them all to the dining-room,” she told him. “Every spring is such a beautiful new thing, it has to be allowed to reign supreme for a little while in here. It gives me rather an ache to see them, all the same”—after a pause—“they make me dream of the smell of the new woodland, that delicious, damp, earthy smell of spring, and all the young, joyful bursting of buds and springing of seeds and the mating birds, and the showers that make the leaves glisten. I feel as if I should like to tramp out across the country in such a shower, and get healthily wet, and be a real bit of the spring for just one week.”
“Why don’t you go? You are not looking very well, and the country air would probably do you no end of good.”
“I don’t want to go alone, and I do not know who I could take. Hal is not able to leave, and mother would merely be bored to tears, and Flip Denton is at Monte Carlo. There is no one really but you and Hal and Flip who would fit in with my spring mood. Any one else would strike a discordant note.”
“I wish I could come.”
The wish escaped him almost involuntarily, as, with the sight of the spring flowers and the spring scent in his nostrils, he too felt the call of the fresh, wild, vigorous things in his blood.