| "Love can tell, and Love alone, Whence the million stars were strewn; Why each atom knows its own; How, in spite of woe and death, Gay is life, and sweet is breath." |
R. Bridges.
Dick walked home. It was a good long tramp, but he was glad of the exercise and the opportunity it gave him to arrange his thoughts into some sort of order. He had spoken to Joan, carried away by the moment, as they stood to say good-night, impelled to frankness by the appeal of her eyes. Now, slowly, reason gathered all its forces together to argue against his inclination. It would be wiser to break his half-made promise to the girl, and stay out of her life altogether. Immeasurable difficulties lay in the way of his marrying her. There was the child, her present position, his people's feelings and his own dismay as he had watched her dancing on the stage and seen her smiling and radiant from the applause it awoke. He had built his dreams on a five minutes' memory and for two years the girl's eyes had haunted him, but none the less it was surely rather absurd. Even love, strong, mysterious power as it is, can be suppressed and killed if a man really puts his mind to it.
At this moment, though of course Dick was not aware of the psychological happening, Love raised a defiant head amid the whirl of his thoughts and laughed at him—laughed deliberately, the sound echoing with all the old joy of the world, and Dick fell to thinking about Joan again. Her eyes, the way she walked, the undercurrent of sadness that had lain behind her gaiety. How good it would be to take her away from all the drabness of her present life and to bring real laughter, real happiness to her lips and eyes!
"I will marry her," he decided stormily, as he turned in to the drive of the house. "Why have I been arguing about it all this time? It is what I had made up my mind to do two years ago. I will marry her."
And again Love laughed, filling his heart with an indefinable glow of gladness.
His night mood stayed with him the next morning and started him singing most riotously in his bath. Mabel heard him and smiled to herself. It was good to listen, to him and know him so cheerful; whatever it was that had disturbed him the night before had evidently vanished this morning.
After breakfast, as was always her custom in summer, she took little Dickie out on to the lawn to sit under the big wide trees that threw so grateful a shade across the green. Big Dick joined them there with his pipe and he sat beside them in silence. It was very pleasant in the garden with the bluest of blue skies overhead and the baby chuckling and crowing in the very first rapture of life on the grass at their feet. Presently, however, a stern nurse descended on the scene and laughter was changed to tears for one short minute before the young gentleman, protesting but half-heartedly, was removed. Then Dick turned to Mabel.
"I am going in to Sevenoaks again," he announced, "and shall probably spend the day there. Would you like me to explain myself, Mabel?"
"Why, yes, if you care to," she answered, "and if there is anything to explain."