So we talked; and at last very wet, still glowing but a little tired, we parted at the garden door. We had been wandering for two hours in our strange irrational community of happiness, and all the world about us, and particularly Lady Osprey and her household, had been asleep—and dreaming of anything rather than Beatrice in the night and rain.
She stood in the doorway, a muffled figure with eyes that glowed.
“Come back,” she whispered. “I shall wait for you.”
She hesitated.
She touched the lapel of my coat. “I love you NOW,” she said, and lifted her face to mine.
I held her to me and was atremble from top to toe. “O God!” I cried. “And I must go!”
She slipped from my arms and paused, regarding me. For an instant the world seemed full of fantastic possibilities.
“Yes, Go!” she said, and vanished and slammed the door upon me, leaving me alone like a man new fallen from fairyland in the black darkness of the night.
III
That expedition to Mordet Island stands apart from all the rest of my life, detached, a piece by itself with an atmosphere of its own. It would, I suppose, make a book by itself—it has made a fairly voluminous official report—but so far as this novel of mine goes it is merely an episode, a contributory experience, and I mean to keep it at that.