"Don't be tragic, Vera," he said quickly. "Disbrowe, by all means. Let us play at being boy and girl again. Let us do daring things on Okehampton's twopenny-halfpenny yacht, and ride horses that other people are afraid to handle. Let us put fire into the embers of the past. I suppose your aunt will have a few amusing people. It won't be the vicar and his wife and sister-in-law every night, and the curate at luncheon every other day."
"She will have all sorts and conditions, but that doesn't matter. I want to be with you in the place where we were so happy."
"You want to fall in love with me again? Well, it was time," he said, half gaily and half sadly; but with always the air of a man who means to take life easily.
August was August that year, and Disbrowe was at its best. The great red cliffs, the azure and emerald sea had the colour and the glory that had made North Devon fairyland for the child Vera in her one blissful summer.
Other children, as they grew up, had a succession of delicious summers to look back upon, and could make comparisons, and wonder which was happiest; but Vera had only one season of surpassing joy to remember. She remembered it now, and contrived to draw a thick curtain over all other memories.
Aunt Mildred was full of compliments.
"This air evidently suits you, child," she said, when her niece had been with her a week. "You look ten years younger than when I saw you last in London."
These two who had begun to be tired of each other were lovers again—and even memory was kind—even memory, the slow torture of thoughtful minds. They recalled the joys of fifteen years ago; and the joys of to-day were almost the same. Instead of the thirteen two barb there were half a dozen hunters—thoroughbreds of fine quality, the disappointments of Claude's racing stud—instead of the dinghy there was Okehampton's forty-ton cutter, a rakish craft that had begun life at Cowes, another disappointment. There was the sea, and there was the moorland, and there were the patches of wood on the skirts of the park, that had seemed boundless forests to Vera in her twelfth year. Her twelfth year? She remembered Claude's affected contempt for her youth.