She clung to him convulsively; and, all at once, there came insistently to Mark Gifford, George Herbert's beautiful saying: "There is an hour in which a man may be happy all his life, can he but find it." Perhaps that hour, that moment, had come to him now.
"Blanche," he whispered, "Blanche—darling! You didn't really mean what you wrote yesterday? Don't you think the time has come when two such old friends as you and I might—"
"—make fools of themselves?"
She looked up at him, and there came a quivering smile over her disfigured face. "Yes, if you really wish it, Mark. I'll do just as you like."
"D'you really mean that?" he asked.
And she said firmly: "Yes, Mark—I really do mean it." And he felt her yielding—yielding in spirit as well as in body—in body as well as in spirit.
"I suppose you couldn't come back with me to London, now?" he asked a little shyly. "We could get the woman at the post office down there to send up a letter to Bubbles, explaining that you had to go away unexpectedly, and telling her to follow you to town to-day."
It was rather a wild proposal, and he was not surprised when he saw her shake her head. "I can't do that," she said. "But oh, Mark, I wish I could! Bubbles is in bed. There was an accident—it's too long to tell you about it now. But, of course, I'll manage to get her away to-day."
And then the oppressive horror of it all suddenly came back to her. "When did you say they were going to arrest Lionel?"
She uttered the words slowly, and with difficulty.