She moved closer to him. "You are very happy, are you not, Oliver?" she asked in a low voice, and looking up into his face.
And again he answered at once, almost as though he had seen the question in her eyes before she uttered it: "Very, very happy, mother! I don't suppose any man has ever been happier than I have been."
Again she put an intimate, probing question, wondering at her own courage, her own temerity, in doing so. "Laura wholly satisfies you?" she asked, allowing nothing of the doubt which was still in her heart to creep into her voice.
"Wholly," he said, again in that strong, confident voice. "And, mother—?" he waited a moment, and then, in a voice suddenly tense with emotion, he muttered—"what she is to me, I, all unworthy though I be, am to her. Do you know what—what response means to a man?"
"I think I do," she said in a low voice.
They remained silent. She felt as if she were, for the first time, fused in intense spiritual communion with her son.
He broke the spell. "There's something I want you to know," he said. And then he stopped short, and, looking away, exclaimed, "Laura shall tell you!" The carriage gong echoed through the great house. He opened the door, she passed through it, and so together they walked down to the large, rather bare hall. There they waited a few moments in silence, till there came the sound of light footsteps—Laura running downstairs, a small fur cap on her beautiful head.
She hurried towards them, smiling, and Mrs. Tropenell turned away—a twinge of jealous pain, of which she was ashamed, in her heart—and stared into the big log fire.
She heard Oliver exclaim, in accents at once imploring and imperious: "Laura? Come over here a moment."
At last she, the mother, turned slowly round, to see, through the half-open door of Lord St. Amant's study, the two standing together, locked in each other's arms, Laura looking up into Oliver's face with an expression of rapt devotion, of entire absorption, in her blue, heavy-lidded eyes. As their lips met, Mrs. Tropenell looked quickly away. She asked herself if this exalted passion could last, and whether, after all, Oliver were not happier now than he could ever hope to be again?