CHAPTER XXIX
SEKHET SMILES
Until the end of the week Evarne posed for Jack Hardy alone. She had now acquired an entirely fresh interest and new importance in that young man's eyes, and he exerted himself to amuse and cheer her during these early days of separation. Geoffrey was not much mentioned between them. Prudence on the one side, and an instinctive restraint on the other, prevented this. Nevertheless, Evarne was conscious of an added loss when she left this studio to sit for a woman artist, and her surroundings were no longer imbued with the magnetism of the absent one.
But letters from Geoff promptly proceeded to rain down upon her. Within twenty-four hours of his quitting London came a brief note, and apparently his first act on reaching Venice was to write to her for the second time.
"I shall let four full days go by before I answer," she decided. But ere that time had passed, a third very lengthy epistle had arrived, which concluded with the gentlest of reproaches for her unkind negligence in not replying sooner. Thus, when she did sit down after supper one evening to write her first letter to Geoffrey, many pages covered with his handwriting were spread out before her gaze.
The correspondence thus commenced rapidly developed into the most engrossing, enthralling, and delightful feature in the existence of these two. They exchanged ideas, sympathies, experiences, hopes and fears; and their uttermost frankness on any and every subject but served to show with increased emphasis how harmonious were their innermost natures, how naturally their minds trod the same paths.
Both wrote well and easily, although for some time Evarne, with true feminine discretion, retained a firm grip upon the too frank display of the strength of her affection for Geoffrey. But the days in which she forbade her written words to adequately express what she felt were very speedily left behind. As to the young man himself, all his cautious scruples had exhausted themselves in leading him out of England. From the first he was troubled by few restrictions, and within a month he was avowedly writing love letters.
He had never made any abrupt and startling declaration of his feelings, let alone of his intentions. It was just a case of swift yet easy drifting. He appeared to deem it a matter of course that Evarne knew and recognised the fact that he loved her, and that all else was to be taken for granted. She was both amused and attracted by this simple and unobtrusive change in their correspondence from comparative formality to tender truth. She expressed no surprise, but took it all quietly and without comment. Indeed, it seemed really but a natural and ordinary thing that she and Geoffrey should acknowledge their love. It was a continuance of a pretence of mere friendship between them that would have seemed extraordinary. To abandon any disguise was not only easy and comforting—it was instinctive.
Thus all those fresh vague thoughts, those dominating and ardent emotions that love brings into being, and which suppression causes to torture the brain wherein they are conceived, were granted free scope and outlet in the heart-to-heart letters that they wrote so gladly one to another. And their love grew and strengthened steadily from this use and outgiving.
It had been some time before Evarne had got to the point of responding with equal frankness to Geoff's ardent epistles, but she did arrive at last.
"You tell me to think of you, Geoff," she sat happily writing one evening. "I do, indeed I do, remember you as steadily as even you yourself could possibly desire. To say I think of you every hour is not enough—you are never out of my mind or my heart, night and day. I don't mean that I think actively and consciously of you quite all the time, but the sense of your personality, the deep thought of you, is incessantly with me. It has become a part of my mind, I fancy; for I think of you without realising it, simultaneously with thinking deliberately of other matters.