When all had been said, it was she who could not speak; and he gathered her to him, kissing with a passion of tenderness her wet lashes, her trembling lips——
At last: "Beloved—has the blank space gone?" he asked. "Are you content now?"
"Content! I'm lifted to the skies."
"To the tipmost top of them?" he queried in her ear; and mutely she clung to him, returning his kisses, with the confidence of a child, with the intensity of a woman....
All too soon it was over—their one mere day: the walk back through the wood—never more enchanted than on a night of full moon: Tara, dropped from the skies, lost to everything but the sound of Roy's voice in the darkness, deep and soft, like the voice of her own heart heard in a dream. It seemed incredible that there would be to-morrow—and to-morrow—and to-morrow, world without end....
Back in the garden, Jeffers—a miracle of tact—wandered away to commune with an idea, leaving father and son alone together.
Sir Nevil offered Roy a cigarette, and they sat down in two of the six empty chairs near the beeches and smoked steadily without exchanging a remark.
But this time they were thinking of one woman. For at parting Tara had said again, "It's all been her doing—first and last." And Roy—with every faculty sensitised to catch ethereal vibrations above and below the human octave—divined that identical thought in his father's silence. Her doing indeed! None of them—not even his father—knew it better than himself.
And now, while he sat there utterly still in the midst of stillness—no stir in the tree-tops, no movement anywhere but the restless glow of Broome's cigar—the inexpressible sense of her stole in upon him, flooding his spirit like a distillation from the summer night. Moment by moment the impression deepened and glowed within him. Never, since that morning at Chitor, had it so uplifted and fulfilled him....