"Heaven," he suggested.
"Yes." She took his hand. "All that--and more. But all the same, we're outcasts. We've got to realize that the world, our world, won't forgive us for having been in heaven."
Sotto voce, he consigned the world to perdition. Aloud, he answered, "They'll forgive us all right. As soon as H. B. makes up his mind to do the right thing. I expect that's what's at the bottom of the mater's wire."
"Do you?" Intimacy had made this great difference in their relationship: that they could talk of Hector dispassionately enough. "Do you? I wish I were sure. He's a peculiar man. Very obstinate and rather cruel. He may make--difficulties."
"He'll make no difficulties."
Aliette changed the topic. For a week past, the vague possibility of Hector's abiding by his threat had been frightening her. Once, even, she had precisely perceived the social ostracism such a course might entail. But in the sunshine and sea-shine of Chilworth Cove, social ostracism seemed a very tiny price to pay for happiness so great as theirs.
The first fine madness, the glamor of the grand passion was still on her, still on them both. Julia's telegram, which--cycle-forwarded across eight miles of common-land from Chilton Junction--threw the tiny port into a state of seething curiosity, excited its recipients hardly at all. Selfish with the sublime selfishness of mating-time, they regarded the threatened irruption of a mundane personality into paradise as the merest episode.
Nevertheless, as she watched the innkeeper's pony-cart, Ronnie at its reins, rattle away between the pink-washed cottages, slow to a walk up the white road, and disappear among the heathery ridges at sky-line, Aliette grew conscious of a deep abiding joy that--whatever else of harm she might bring into her lover's life--at least she had not separated him from his mother.
And all morning, all afternoon, busied with Caroline Staley in preparation for their guest, that joy warded every apprehension from her mind.