Mrs. Needham found another opponent, leaving the two sisters alone with Wilberforce, who offered Aliette some tea. She accepted, and accompanied them back to their table; where, after a few minutes, Cavendish and Spillcroft joined them.
Sipping her tea, listening with half an ear to the conversations all round her, Aliette Brunton was, for the first time, aware of social danger. She felt a furious desire to talk with Ronnie, to look at him. But to-day no frailest rose-bubble of enchantment isolated them from their kind. To-day all the other instincts warned that she must avert her eyes, avert her voice. Nobody--not even Mollie--must guess their secret. Somehow she no longer doubted it their secret. Her very fears gave her the certainty of him. She stole a look, sideways under long lashes, into his blue eyes; and knew--knew that he loved her.
Yes, he loved her. Not as Hector imagined love, solely in the possessive. But in all ways; with passion, with tenderness with as much regard for her as for himself.
Fleetingly, she marveled that this thing should have happened to her; to both of them. How had it happened? Why? What did the why or the how of the thing matter? Sufficed--for the ecstatic moment--the knowledge that they loved one another.
But the man did not know. Certain of himself, he held no certainty of her. Even his self-certainty seemed evanescent in her presence. Surely he had not dared to let himself adore this radiant, perfect creature! Surely, even daring to adore, he would never dare tell her of his adoration! She was like the goddesses, utterly removed from the touch of a man, utterly aloof from him. Then, fleetingly, he knew her no goddess, but a wife--Hector Brunton's wife. And all the scruples of his code made the knowledge bitter in his mouth.
"Cavendish hasn't got a word to say for himself," thought Mollie. "Jimmy's ever so much better-looking--though Jimmy's tennis is rotten. I sha'n't let Jimmy play in this set." And she insisted, following the high-handed method of the modern young, on playing with Spillcroft against Cavendish and her sister.
Ronnie's patters proved somewhat less out of practice than he had imagined.
"Thank you, partner," smiled Aliette, after the last stroke of the third, and decisive, set. "Your volleying saved, the day."
"Oh, I didn't have much to do with it," he smiled back.
Since the beginning of the match, except for the necessities of the strokes, they had hardly spoken to one another. But, for each, the forty minutes of partnership, the mutual will to win, the clean struggle on clean grass, the open air and the exercise had been one long delight.