"And what?"
She laughed. "Memory fails me. I don't know."
His eyes glowed like fire.
"Don't you?" he said, with a tremor in his beautiful voice. "Come and learn!"
He rose and held out his arms.
Mona tried to laugh, but the laugh died away on her lips; she looked out of the window, but the landscape swam before her eyes; even the noisy racketing of the train sank away into the background of her perception, and she was conscious of nothing save the magnetism of his presence, and then of the passionate pressure of his arms. Her head fell back, and her beautiful lips—all ignorant and undefended—lay just beneath his own.
Oh human love! what are you?—the fairest thing that God has made, or a Will-o'-the-wisp sent to brighten a brief space of life's journey with delusive light? I know not. This I know, that when Ralph sent a kiss vibrating through Mona's being, waking up a thousand echoes that had scarcely been stirred before, the happiness of those two human souls was almost greater than they could bear.
CHAPTER LX.
ON THE RIVER.
Mona did not go to Surbiton, after all, that day. She telegraphed to her friend from Clapham Junction, and then she and Ralph took the train to Richmond.