If Jervis came back, if he and she both lived till the end of the War, it was here that their marriage would take place. But the girl had a strange presentiment that they two would never stand over there, where so many brides and bridegrooms had stood together, even within her short memory. It was not that she felt Jervis was going to be killed—she was mercifully spared those dread imaginings which were to come on her later. But just now, for these few moments only perhaps, Rose Otway was “fey”; she seemed to know that to-day was her cathedral marriage day, and that an invisible choir was singing her epithalamium.
The quarter past the hour chimed. She released her hand from his, and touched him on the arm with a lingering, caressing touch. He was so big and strong, so gentle too—all hers. And now, just as they had found one another, she was going to lose him. It seemed so unnatural and so cruel. “Jervis,” she whispered, and the tears ran down her face, “I think you had better go now. I’d rather we said good-bye here.”
He got up at once. “Do you mean to tell your mother?” he asked. And then, as he thought she was hesitating: “I only want to know because, if so, I will tell them at home.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said brokenly. “I’d rather we said nothing now—if you don’t mind.”
She lifted up her face to him as a child might have done; and, putting his arm round her, he bent down and kissed her, very simply and gravely. Suddenly, he took her two hands and kissed their soft palms; and then he stooped very low, and lifting the hem of her cotton frock kissed that too.
“Rose?” he cried out suddenly. “Oh, Rose, I do love you so!” And then, before she could speak he had turned and was gone.
CHAPTER XI
Rather more than an hour and a half later, Rose Otway, with bursting heart, but with dry, gleaming eyes—for she had a nervous fear of her mother’s affectionate questioning, and she had already endured Anna’s well-meant, fussy, though still unspoken sympathy—stood at the spare-room window of the Trellis House. From there she could watch, undisturbed, the signs of departure now going busily on before the big gates of the group of three Georgian houses known as “Robey’s.”
Piles of luggage, bags, suit-cases, golf sticks, and so on, were being put outside and inside the mid-Victorian fly, which was still patronised by the young gentlemen of “Robey’s,” in their goings and comings from the station. And then, even before the old cab-horse had started his ambling trot townwards, Mr. and Mrs. Robey, their two little girls, and their three boys not long back from school, all appeared together at the gate.
In their midst stood Jervis Blake, his tall figure towering above them all.