He leaned slightly toward her, one hand on the dial’s time-notched rim. “Don’t you know?” he said in a lower voice. “Could any other spot mean to me what that acre under the hemlocks means?”
Her face was turned from him, her fingers pulling at the drifting vine, and a splinter of sunlight tangled in her hair like a lace of fireflies.
“I could never forget it,” he continued. “The thing that spoiled my father’s life happened there, yet there we two first talked, and there you—”
“Don’t!” she said, facing him. “Don’t!”
“Ah, let me speak! I want to tell you that I shall carry the memory of that afternoon, and of your brave kindness, always, always! If I were never to see you again in this life, I should always treasure it. If I died of thirst in some Sahara, it would be the last thing I should remember—your face would be the last thing I should see! If I—”
He paused, his veins beating hard under the savage self-repression, his hand trembling against the stone, his voice a traitor, yielding to something that rose in his throat to choke the stumbling words.
In the silence there was the sound of a slow footfall on the gravel walk, and at the same moment he saw a magical change. Shirley drew back. The soft gentian blue of her eyes darkened. The lips that an instant before had been tremulous, parted in a low delicious laugh. She swept him a deep curtsey.
“I am beholden to you, sir,” she said gaily, “for a most knightly compliment. There’s the major. Come and let us show him where we’ve planted the ramblers.”