She glowed at a memory. “You wrote to me about that. You said that, before the Printing Press, people used to get poetry by heart.”
He looked down at her where she lay at ease. “'As I have got you,' I said.” She dreamed beneath her flickering eyelids.
“You had me then. I didn't know it; but you had. And you have me still. That's wonderful. But now I have got you!” She lay awhile under the spell of him and the thought, and glowed and blossomed under them until at last, flowering like a rose, she turned and hid her face in his arm. Senhouse, grave and strong, let her lie where she was; but he felt the pulsing of her bosom, and was moved to utterance. Nothing in the eyes he bent down to her beauty, and nothing in his words betrayed the passion of his heart.
{Illustration: Senhouse came back to her bedside and put a little flower into her hand}
“The loveliest thing in all the world to me,” he said, “is a beautiful thing bent in humility, stooping to serve. I shall see you teaching your children. They will be at your knees, on your knees; you will kiss them, and I shall go mad with joy. Flowers and you! Yes, we'll have our school. We'll teach people the beauty of their own business by means of the most beautiful things. Flowers and you!”
They talked long and late, walking down the valley to the farmstead for bread. On this, with milk and fruit, they supped after Sanchia had bathed, and clad herself in one of his Moorish robes. Hooded and folded in this she sat at meat, and Senhouse, filled with the Holy Ghost, discoursed at large. The past they took for granted; the present was but a golden frame for the throbbing blue of the days to come.
Very early on the morning after the night when, as has been foretold, she was made a wife under the stars, Senhouse came back to her bedside and put a little flower into her hand. It woke her out of her dreams; glozed and dewy from them she looked at it, and smiled at him through it. In grey-green leafage, dewy and downy, lay a little blossom of delicate pink, chalice-shaped, with a lip of flushed white. Watching him, she laid it to her lips. “My flower, our flower,” she said, and watching him still put it deep within her bosom. “My dear one, we have earned it.”
“'Rest-Harrow,'” said Senhouse, in a sententious mood, “'grows in any soil.... The seed may be sown as soon as ripe, in warm, sheltered spots out of doors.... It is a British plant.' So says Weathers, the learned.”