Later, when they sat in the early summer night, under a moon blurred to a phantom by the mist, when the changed lines of his face were no longer relentless and they two became little more than voices and remembered presences to each other, she began to find him indeed unchanged. Even his voice had in an hour curiously lost that hurting strangeness. As she listened she became absent, almost drowsy with memories of that far night when his voice was quite the same and their hands had trembled together—with such prescience that through all the years her hand was to feel the groping of his.
Yet awkward enough was that first half-hour of their sitting side by side in the night, on the wide piazza of his old home. Before them the lawn stretched unbroken to the other big house, where Nancy had wondered her way to womanhood. Empty now it was, darkened as those years of her dreaming girlhood must be to the present. Should she enter it, she knew the house would murmur with echoes of other days; there would be the wraith of the girl she once was flitting as of old through its peopled rooms.
And out there actually before her was the stretch of lawn where she had played games of tragic pretense with the imperious, dreaming boy. Vividly there came back that late afternoon when the monster of Bernal's devising had frightened them for the last time—when in a sudden flash of insight they had laughed the thing away forever and faced each other with a certain half-joyous, half-foolish maturity of understanding. One day long after this she had humorously bewailed to Bernal the loss of their child's faith in the Gratcher. He had replied that, as an institution, the Gratcher was imperishable—that it was brute humanity's instinctive negation to the incredible perfections of life; that while the child's Gratcher was not the man's, the latter was yet of the same breed, however it might be refined by the subtleties of maturity: that the man, like the child, must fashion some monster of horror to deter him when he hears God's call to live.
She had not been able to understand, nor did she now. She was looking out to the two trees where once her hammock had swung—to the rustic chair, now falling apart from age, from which Bernal had faced her that last evening. Then with a start she was back in the present. Nancy of the old days must be shut fat in the old house. There she might wander and wonder endlessly among the echoes and the half-seen faces, but never could she come forth; over the threshold there could pass only the wife of Allan Linford.
Quick upon this realisation came a sharp fear of the man beside her—a fear born of his hand's hold upon hers when they had met. She shrank under the memory of it, with a sudden instinct of the hunted. Then from her new covert of reserve she dared to peer cautiously at him, seeking to know how great was her peril —to learn what measure of defense would best insure her safety—recognising fearfully the traitor in her own heart.
Their first idle talk had died, and she noted with new alarm that they had been silent for many minutes. This could not safely be—this insidious, barrier-destroying silence. She seemed to hear his heart beating high from his own sense of peril. But would he help her? Would he not rather side with that wretched traitor within her, crying out for the old days—would he not still be the proud fool who would suffer no man's law but his own? She shivered at the thought of his nearness—of his momentous silence—of his treacherous ally.
She stirred in her chair to look in where Clytie bustled between kitchen and dining-room. Her movement aroused him from his own abstraction. For a breathless stretch of time she was frozen to inertness by sheer terror. Would that old lawless spirit utter new blasphemies, giving fearful point to them now? Would the old eager hand come again upon hers with a boy's pleading and a man's power? And what of her own secret guilt? She had cherished the memory of him and across space had responded to him through that imperious need of her heart. Swiftly in this significant moment she for the first time saw herself with critical eyes—saw that in her fancied security she had unwittingly enthroned the hidden traitor. More and more poignant grew her apprehension as she felt his eyes upon her and divined that he was about to speak. With a little steadying of the lips, with eyes that widened at him in the dim light, she waited for the sound of his voice—waited as one waits for something "terrible and dear"—the whirlwind that might destroy utterly, or pass—to leave her forever exulting in a new sense of power against elemental forces.
"Would you mind if I smoked, Nance?"
She stared stupidly. So tense had been her strain that the words were mere meaningless blows that left her quivering. He thought she had not heard.
"Would you mind my pipe—and this very mild mixture?"