And that Eliot loved her in return she had now no doubt. In that brief, poignant moment of understanding, as they stood together in the warm starlit dusk, he had revealed it. She could still feel his lips crushed suddenly against her palm, and hear his shaken voice: “Ann, do you think I shall find the way?”
The way to the garden of happy hours! They would find it together. He had known many bitter hours, and out of them had learned a dogged scepticism—a cynical mistrust of the thing which is called love. And with all the young, uplifting faith that was in her Ann vowed to herself that what one woman had pulled down, destroyed, she would build up and make live again.
She was no longer frightened of love—not even of a love that by the very nature of things might exact far more from her than from most women. She would never be afraid of the big claims which life might make on her. Hitherto, whatever had come her way she had met with a gay courage and confidence, and now that the biggest thing of all had come to her, with its shadow of incalculable demands upon her womanhood, she would go to meet that, too, with the same brave steadfastness.
With the unerring instinct of the mother-woman, she realised how Eliot had fought against his love for her, tried to withstand it, utterly distrustful of her sex, and she smiled with a tenderly amused indulgence as she recalled his sudden withdrawals and brusquenesses. His sending down a groom to inquire how she was—it had hurt her badly at the time to think he cared so little. But now she recognised that it was because he cared so much—so much that he had begun to be afraid. So he had hidden behind his groom!
And with the realisation of how much he cared—must care, to have striven so hard to hide and fight it down—she was shaken with a shy, quivering ecstasy, a hesitant sweetness of need and longing that pulsed through every nerve of her. The thought of the morrow almost frightened her. He would come to-morrow—come to tell her all that he had left unsaid, to claim that promise of surrender which a woman both loves and fears to give.
... It was late when at last she slept, and she woke to find the sunlight streaming in through her window, and Maria standing at her bedside, an appetising breakfast-tray in her hands and a world of shrewd suspicion in her twinkling eyes. Last night she had chanced to look out of her kitchen window—which admitted of a slanting glimpse of the Cottage gateway—and had drawn her own deductions accordingly.
“You’ve had a brave sleep, Miss Ann,” she observed, as she deposited the tray she was carrying on a small table beside the bed. “Mr. Coventry stayed late, I reckon?”
Ann flushed a little, smiling. She did not resent the kindly inquisitiveness which gleamed at her out of Maria’s sharp old eyes, but she had no mind to gratify it at the moment.
“Not very late. I think he left by about eleven o’clock,” she answered, with quite a good assumption of indifference. “But I expect being out in the fresh air for the first time for several days made me sleep rather soundly. Why didn’t you call me as usual? I’m not an invalid any longer, you know.”
“I thought if so be you’d a mind to sleep on, ‘twouldn’t do you no harm,” vouchsafed Maria rather grumpily. She was inwardly burning with curiosity, but felt unequal to the task of coping with her young mistress’s facility for eluding tentative inquiries, so she stumped downstairs to the kitchen regions, and left her to consume her breakfast in solitude.