He took her hand, and raised it solemnly to his lips.
“I swear to you,” he said, “that I will take you. I swear that I will be the truest and most faithful of husbands so long as God gives me life!”
“I swear to you,” she cried in response, “that I will be a true wife. Whatever has happened, whatever may come, I swear that you shall never regret it. I will love you; I will be your slave. Nothing, nothing can be too much!”
They clung together in silence. The nearness, the stillness, the deep welling of joy in the sweet human contact, were all-engrossing. Rupert would fain have banished all difficulties into the future, and given himself up to untrammelled enjoyment of the hour, but the urgency of Eve’s appeal forbade postponement.
He raised himself, supporting her in his arms.
“Eve! from this moment you and I are one. What belongs to one, belongs to the other; we can have no secrets, no concealments. If there are difficulties in our way, I must be prepared to meet them. Who is this woman? What right has she or anyone else to dictate what you should or should not do?”
Her eyes gazed back into his with a deep, unseeing gaze, the delicate eyebrows creased as if in an effort of thought; then once again she lifted her hand and pressed it against her brow. Poignantly beautiful, poignantly sad, she sat and gave him her answer.
“I live with them,” she said quietly. “They take care of me. I think—I think I am mad!”
Rupert Dempster lost no time in questioning his hostess as to the history of the Dream Woman who had come to fill such a real place in his life. As soon as the guests had departed he put in a plea for a private conversation, whereupon Mrs Melhuish seated herself on a chair at the farther side of the lawn, and drew a long breath of mingled fatigue, and relief.
“That’s over, thank goodness! This annual garden-party to the neighbourhood looms over me like a nightmare. I feel ten years younger when the last carriage has driven away from the door. Now! what can I do for you? But I know, of course. You’ve fallen a victim to Eve Bisdee and her beaux yeux. They are beautiful! It’s about once in a lifetime that one meets an Englishwoman with such eyes as hers. It seems superfluous to have a tongue, when all that one feels can be expressed so eloquently in a glance. Even now her eyes are wonderful; but if you’d seen her as a girl, before—”