She brought a stool and established herself close to him. He acknowledged her presence without removing his eyes from the storm-tossed glory of the sky.
"Look, Ladybird—look!" he urged in a low tone. "We can talk afterwards."
But her attention was caught and riveted by the reflection of the glory in her husband's face.
"Does it please you so tremendously?" she asked in honest bewilderment. "Just a sunset! You've seen hundreds of them before."
He smiled and answered nothing. Speech and emotion inhabit different hemispheres of a man's brain; woman alone is rash enough to force them into unwilling union.
The clinging garment of mist, driven and dispersed by day's last flash of self-assertion, lay heaped and tumbled in the valleys, and the mountains stood knee-deep in an opalescent sea of foam. It was as though Nature, in a mood of capricious kindliness, had rent the veil, that mortals might share in the triumphal passing of the sun, whose supremacy had been in eclipse these many days.
Above the deep-toned quiet of earth, blurred and ragged clouds showed every conceivable tone of umber and grey, from purest pearl-white to darkest depths of indigo. Only low down, where a blue-black mass ended with level abruptness, a flaming strip of day was splashed along the west—one broad brush-stroke, as it were, by some Titanic artist whose palette held liquid fire. Snows and mist alike caught and flung back the radiance in a maze of rainbow hues; while beyond the bank of cloud a vast pale fan of light shot outward and upward to the very zenith of heaven. Each passing minute wrought some imperceptible change of grouping, form, or colour; blurred masses melted to flakes and strata on a groundwork of frail blue; orange deepened to crimson; and anon earth and sky were on fire with tints of garnet and rose. Each several snow-peak blushed like an angel surprised in a good deed. Splashes of colour sprang from cloud-tip to cloud-tip with invisible speed, till even the chill east glowed with a faint hue of life.
And in the midst of the transient splendour, enveloped by the isolation of the falling day, husband and wife sat silent, absorbed in strangely opposite reflections. Verily they dwelt in different planets, these two who had willed to be one, but whom forces more potent held it inexorably apart.
Desmond had long since passed beyond the border-line of definite thought; while Evelyn's mind rapidly reverted to the more congenial atmosphere of things terrestrial. An unknown force was urging her to speak openly to her husband, to rid herself of the shadow that had begun to tarnish the bright surface of life. It would be easier to speak in dusk than in bald daylight—easier also before the bloom of reunion had been rubbed off by the prosaic trivialities of life. In her present position, too, it would be possible to avoid his gaze; and she found a singular difficulty in tampering with facts when Theo's eyes were on her face.