CHAPTER XX—THE SHADOW OF THE FUTURE
GOLD of gorse and purple of heather, a shimmering haze of heat quivering above the undulating green of the moor, and somewhere, high up in the cloud-flecked blue above, the exultant, piercingly sweet carol of a lark.
“Oh! How utterly perfect this is!” sighed Jean.
She was lying at full length on the springy turf, her chin cupped in her hands, her elbows denting little cosy hollows of darkness in the close mesh of green moss.
Tormarin, equally prone, was beside her, his eyes absorbing, not the open vista of rolling moor, hummocked with jagged tors of brown-grey stone, but the sun as it rioted through a glory of red-brown hair and touched changeful gleams of gold into topaz eyes.
There was a queer little throb in Jean’s voice, the low note of almost passionate delight which sheer beauty never failed to draw from her. It plucked at the chords of memory, and Tormarin’s thoughts leaped back suddenly to that day they had spent together in the mountains, when, as they emerged from the pinewood’s gloom to the revelation of the great white-pinacled Alps, she had turned to him with the rapt cry: “It’s so beautiful that it makes one’s heart ache!”
“Do you remember——” he began involuntarily, then checked himself.
“’M—m?” she queried. The little interrogative murmur was tantalising in its soft note of intimacy.