They had sat there in silence, holding each other's hands. The excitement, the delirious devil in them, had spent itself, and under it they felt the heaving, dragging groundswell of their passion.
To Winny it had never come before like this. Up till now it had been enough simply to be with Ranny. Merely to look at him gave her profound and poignant pleasure. To touch him in those rare accidental contacts the adventure brought them, to feel the firm muscles of his arm under his coat sleeve, stopped her breath with a kind of awe and wonder, as if in Ranny's body thus discerned she came unaware upon some transcendent mystery.
Yet Winny knew now why, in what way, and with what terrible strength she loved him and he her. She loved him, primarily and supremely, for himself, for the simple fact that he was Ranny. She loved him also for his body, for his slenderness, and for his strong-clipping limbs, and she loved him for his face because it could not by any possibility be anybody else's.
And in her joy and tenderness, in their engagement and in the whole adventure, this going out with him and all the rare, shy contacts it occasioned, instalments of delight, windfalls of bliss that Heaven sent her to be going on with, in the very secrecy and mystery of it all, Winny felt that disturbing yet delicious sense of something iniquitous, something perilous, something, at any rate, unlawful. It was the same sense that she had known and enjoyed in the days when she went into the scullery at Granville to make beefsteak pies for Ranny; the same sense, but far more exquisite, far more exciting.
She did not connect it in any way with Violet. Violet had ceased to exist for them. Violet had of her own act annihilated herself. But Winny knew that until Ranny was divorced from his wife the law continued to regard him as married to her. So that, while firm land held and would always hold her, she was aware that he and she were walking on the brink, and that by the rule of the road Ranny went, so to speak, upon the outer edge where it was far more dangerous. She knew that he had more than once looked over; and she knew (though nothing would induce her to look) that the gulf was there, not far from her adventurous feet.
Still, it was wonderful how all these years they had kept their heads.
So she said: "Hadn't we better be going? I think we ought to."
She had unlaced her hand from his, and had turned in her seat to face him with her decision.
"Not yet."
"Well—soon. It's getting rather chilly, don't you think?"