She had stretched out her arms towards me from the deeper gloom in which she sat. And suddenly I realised, that, small and flowerlike and fragile though she was, she was not a girl who was going to take my treasure from me, but a woman who was asking me to let her share with me the pride and the anguish of living under the black shadow of Fear that had darkened my life for four months past.
I turned and went to her quickly and sat down on the sofa beside her and took her into my arms. We did not speak a word, but we stayed there like that for a long, long time—until the Boy's voice suddenly startled us:
"What are you doing here all this time? It's three o'clock. You will both be ill."
"Roland! I thought you were in bed and asleep."
"No. I tried to lie down, but I couldn't. I've been walking up and down the corridor."
He was stooping over us both, drawing us up. His boyish face had become suddenly the face of a man, his voice was the voice of a man, and his touch and his manner had a man's power and a man's dignity.
It was nearly four o'clock when I went to say good-night to him.
The next day in London was like a dream in which things happened with the speed of flashes. It was only at midnight that the Boy and I got any private talk together. His room adjoined mine at the hotel where we were staying for the night, and he came in to me to bring me an offering of sulphur carnations and to show me the dagger he had bought and his miraculously tiny medical outfit.
"Why were you so late for the dinner?" I asked him. For he and I had had a dinner engagement and he had kept dinner waiting for at least an hour.