I am interested in your news, and I trust you will be as happy as you deserve to be.
Yours sincerely,
Agatha Cheale.
CHAPTER VI
“I am the most fortunate man in England! I am the happiest man in the world!”
As he swung along in the bright winter sunshine on the field path which formed a short cut to the town, again and again these words seemed to hammer themselves, in joyful cadence, on Harry Garlett’s brain.
What we call the human heart is full of the strangest twists and turnings, and so, though Garlett’s heart was full of Jean Bower, he threw an affectionately retrospective thought to his late wife. He and “poor Emily” had never had a really cross word during those long, quiet years before the war, when, most fortunately for himself, he had not even dimly apprehended what the passion of love can mean in a human life, and how it will make beautiful, and intimately delicious, even the most prosaic facts of day-to-day existence.
He looked at his watch. It was a quarter past ten. In just twenty-four hours from now he and Jean would be starting for their one week’s honeymoon in London.
His face softened. There came upon it a great awe. God! How he loved her. Every moment they spent together he seemed to discover some new, hitherto hidden beauty of mind, soul, or body in this wonderful, still mysterious, but wholly delightful young creature who not only allowed him to worship her but—miracle of miracles—returned his passion.
Such were the disconnected but wholly contented thoughts which filled half an hour of the last easy, unquestioning, and, as if for an immortal moment, ecstatic morning of Harry Garlett’s life.