He encircled her with his arm, and felt her trembling at his side. “My dear,” he said, “I was writing my Memoirs. Now we'll burn the book, for I see that I am now going to be born.”
She looked up at him laughing. She was the colour of a flushed rose. “My bride,” he said, and kissed her lips. She turned in his arm and clung to him. The storm swept surging over her; passion long pent made her shiver like a blown fire. They took their wild joy....
He led her by her hand to the shade of the valley, where the deep turf is hardly ever dry. She was barefoot, as he was, and bareheaded. In her bosom was a spray of dog-rose.
“You are blue-gowned, like Despoina,” he told her, “and, indeed, that is your name. I am to have a fairy wife.”
“Artemis no more,” she laughed.
“You fulfil all the goddesses. Artemis was your childhood. But let's be practical. What is to be done?” She faltered her answer.
“I have found out by myself what to do,” she said. And then she kissed him. “It's done now.”
They picked up their lives where they had dropped them. They were content to wait for the fulness of their joy. He busied himself with food for her; he cooked, and she helped him; they talked of his affairs as if they had always been hers.
Something stirred the practical side of him. She was to see him as near a man of the world as it was possible for him to be. It might have been a shock to her, but its simplicity was all his own.
“I must see one person, and you must see one. I'll go to your father, and you shall tell Ingram what's going to happen. We don't owe him much, but there's that, I think. I've a great idea of treating the world with civility. The one thing it has worth having is its sense of manners. Let us have manners, then. Don't you think so?” He held her close as he spoke, and with a strange discrepancy between sight and sound, looked at her with dim eyes of love, before which she had to close down her own. To his, “Don't you think so?” she could only murmur without breath, “You mustn't love me so much—not yet, not yet!” but he pressed her the nearer and laughed his joy of her. “What! After eight years! And if I don't hold her very close, Mab, the tricksy sprite, may slip me.”