“There’s always the faintest possible chance,” John assured her. “Oh, I’ll grant it’s the faintest possible, and heaven alone knows where it will spring from. But it’s there, I know it’s there. And we’ve both felt it.”
She nodded.
“I’m glad you’ve felt it too. It adds a little bit more hope, even while I’m almost laughing at myself. Only—what is it we’ve both felt?”
“I don’t know,” said John. “I don’t know an atom. I think I get nearest the mark when I say that it seems as if, somewhere, there’s a dumb voice striving for expression. At least that is the only way I can describe the sensation to myself.”
“And all the time,” she added, “there’s a feeling of quietness in the atmosphere, the quietness that precedes something very important happening.”
“I know,” said John.
“Ah, it’s tantalizing,” she sighed, “the inward knowledge of that, and yet the knowledge of one’s own impotence.”
Her brow was wrinkled in a little frown, half of annoyance, half of something like regretful amusement. It was an adorable little frown, and John longed, ardently longed, to smooth it away. His heart beat and thumped, the while it cried warningly that the time was not yet. And from somewhere near at hand came the liquid note of a pigeon.
“Go slow slowly, go slow slowly,” it seemed to remind him.
“Oh, yes, we’re impotent enough,” assented John, and a trifle gloomily.