The Abbey had been swept and garnished in honour of the occasion, every room brightened with flowers—even that sacred apartment, Brian's study, thrown open to the public. After luncheon it happened somehow—Ida could hardly have explained how—that she and Brian were alone together in this very room, the afternoon sunlight shining on them—for in spite of Lady Palliser's prophecy the day had been lovely—the scent of stocks and mignonette and sweet-peas blowing in upon them from the old-fashioned garden at the back of the Abbey. They had strayed to this spot with the others; and the others had strayed off and left them, Ida looking absently at the backs of the Greek dramatists, Brian looking intently at her.
'I don't think you have been in this house since the day we first met in the hall below?' he said, interrogatively.
'No, I have never been here since.'
'And yet you were once fond of the Abbey. You used to like wandering about the old house and gardens. You would sit reading in the library. The housekeeper has often talked to me about you.'
She stood before him with lowered eyelids, pale and dumb, shrinking from him almost as she had shrunk from him seven years ago by the old sundial in the moonlit garden, when it was a sin to listen to his ardent avowal.
'Ida, why are you silent? Why will you not speak of the past?'
'The past is past!' she said, falteringly. 'It was full of grief and shame for me. I want to forget it if I can.'
'Forget all that is bitter, remember all that is sweet!' he pleaded, drawing nearer to her. 'There is much of that old time which is unspeakably dear to me—the happy time in which I first loved you, deeming you were free to be loved and won. You are free now, Ida, sole mistress of your fate and mine; and I love you as dearly now as I loved you seven years ago. More I could not love you, for I loved you then with all my heart and mind. Ida, you once talked of being mistress of Wendover Abbey. Its master is at your feet, your faithful slave to the end of his life. Will you have this old house for your own, Ida, and thus, and thus only, make it home for me?
His arm was round her, gently, experimentally, the answer not being quite certain, even yet.
She slowly lifted the dark-fringed lids, looked at him with adoring eyes—eyes which never before had looked thus upon the face of man.