“I do not think you are a very good hand at pretending,” she answers, with a flickering smile.
* * * * *
And now the day is done. Has some new Joshua issued a contrary command to that which the first one sent over the wrecked Syrian town, and bid the sun double his speed to the west?
“Sleep well,” Lavinia says.
At his request, and by the condescension of Nurse Blandy, she has gone in to bid him good night at her own bedtime, and long after her services have been dispensed with. The electric light is out, and the moonlight, for whose continued admission during another few minutes he has begged, sleeps in faintly glorious bars and islands on the bed. Long and ghostly he lies there, and ghostly she leans over him. The pallid interrupted light—so interrupted that in a second either of them can withdraw from it under the shield of darkness—gives them a confidence and expansiveness unknown throughout the day. They feel something of the freedom of two innocently tender spirits freed from the shams and prohibitions of the flesh.
“Sleep well!”
She is stooping over him to enable her to see him, and one hand lies on the turned-over sheet. It looks so unearthly that he must think there is no contravention of rules made for the material and the real in carrying it to his ghostly lips. But the unspiritual contact, novel and most sweet, effectually breaks through the etherial figment.
“Do not wish me ‘sleep:’ wish me a blessed lying dream!”
* * * * *
How deep is Lavinia’s thankfulness that Miss Prince’s ignorance of this irregular interview saves her from the awful necessity of at once accounting for and relating it. She reaches her own room, trembling and unstrung. So complete has been her fidelity to Rupert, unconscious of the unusual in its absoluteness, that no man has ever before kissed even her hand, the hand which is so often a wicket-gate leading to the palace of the lips. By the electric light she looks at her right hand—it was the right—which has been desecrated, is it? or for ever ennobled?—her practical, capable right hand, beautiful in shapely strength; and her first feeling is one of regret that it is not more satin-soft, more smoothly worthy of his lips. Shame that at such a crisis—for to her inexperience it seems one—so unworthy an impulse should predominate, burns hotly. But, all the same, the regret holds its own, and keeps its original start.