He sat there, a very solitary man, and his eyes wandered vaguely through the open windows over the bewitched countryside, his gardens and his park and his acres and his forests, shrouded all in a clear gloom as though God was peering at them in the light of a taper. And the heavy moon climbed the heavens. He saw the twisted shapes of tall flowers in the garden, flowers he did not know, for his head-gardener was a man of invention in August. And then, among the tall shapes of the August flowers, he saw one in particular, and this one was the tallest among them, and it moved. But he sat very still and solemn in his chair, watching the shape of the moving flower, between him and the heavy moon. And then it wavered and stood; for a long time it stood, a shadow in the wan countryside. Perhaps it was afraid, all alone there among the flowers. He watched. And then it was framed in the open window, a soft slim shadow. But he did not move.
“What sort of a play is this,” he heard his voice ask, “in which a woman goes away like a coward and comes back like a wraith?”
And into the room she came, and with a sigh she sat down in a chair by the window.
“Oh, dear!” she sighed. “I am so tired....”
His heart was so torn with gladness that for a long time he could not move, he could not speak. And then he walked across the room and stood above her chair. She turned up her little face under the tiger-tawny hair and smiled her funny crooked smile like a naughty fairy’s.
“Poor Aubrey!” she whispered. “Poor Gloria!...”
But he did not touch her.
“Listen, Gloria,” he whispered. “When I found you had gone, my life cracked like an earthenware cup....” And Aubrey Carlyle stopped, amazed by what he had said; for he had never said a thing like that before.
“And now,” he said, “you have mended it again.”
“Have I?” she cried queerly; and the weight of her eyes on him bore him to his knees by her chair. He had not seen her for eight months, but still he did not touch her.