He took it again and held it fast, feeling its warm response. “You make me so happy! Life will not be empty now.” He struggled with the lump in his throat. “With your friendship, what can I not achieve? You shall tell me what I am to strive for.”
“It is too great a responsibility. It was all very well to criticise. I sha’n’t know what to say.”
“You need say nothing. I shall look into your eyes and read it there.”
He looked into them now, and they were not lowered. They were full of sympathetic sweetness, glistening behind tears.
“I am afraid they are rather red,” she said, with a melancholy smile. “If I am not careful they may betray your confidences.”
She moved forward in the direction of the water, and he, turning on his heel, followed, wondering. By a salt pool near the rim of the billows she bent down and bathed her face. To see her half kneeling in the moonlight affected him like reading poetry; and as she washed off the traces of the tears he had made her shed, it seemed to him as if their spiritual friendship were being consecrated by some mystic baptism.
They went in. Olive had not moved from her indolent attitude in the grandfather’s chair. Herbert was standing at the window-curtain.
“I’m so glad you’ve come in,” she said, yawning. “Mr. Herbert has been sulking at having been left behind, and I have been snapping his head off for not leaving me to myself.”
“Yes; Miss Regan speaks the truth for once,” said Herbert, audaciously.
“Oh, I am glad Primitiva is not here to have her ideal shattered. Good-night—before you get ruder.”