"You dear boy!" Touched to the quick response of tears she could barely falter: "You're a million times too good for me, if only you knew!"
"I know this—that the wide world doesn't hold another woman like my woman! Why, Pat, the very sound of your voice lashes all the blood in me into big red roaring waves of love."
"'Big red roaring waves.' Oh, Alan!"
She laughed, driving back the hot salt tears that stung her eyelids. The taxi was waiting at the corner of Blount Street, patiently ticking out twopence. Sherbrand whistled and it approached them. But this time Patrine did not enter. She could not now drive to Waterloo. It was much, much too late. She refused even to be dropped anywhere. She infinitely preferred walking. It was quite a pleasant stroll from there to Harley Street.
So they wrung hands and looked in each other's eyes and parted. When the taxi vanished round the corner of Blount Street, the tall, gallantly-borne figure in the golden-braided hat and pale rose gown began to walk swiftly towards Grosvenor Square. Suddenly it paused, wheeled, and returned upon its paces, passed through the gate in the railings and disappeared into the church.
In bed that night in the chintz-hung room at Harley Street, Patrine, recalling the experience that had followed the yielding to that irresistible prompting, wondered if it had actually taken place, or were woven of the tissue of dreams.
Kneeling upon a bast matting-covered hassock behind the door of the narrow little wooden cell into which she had slipped as a tall, grey-haired officer in Service khaki passed out,—she had rested her elbows upon a narrow ledge before her and peered through a close grating of bronze wire at a figure dimly descried beyond.
The priest was white-haired and of small stature. A meagre ray of light falling from above upon the hands clasped over the ends of the narrow stole of violet-purple that hung loosely about his neck, showed them wasted and yellow-white and deeply wrinkled. By the testimony of the hands he was an old man. Something in the manner of her address must have struck him as unusual. She had not spoken six words in her quick, hot, stammering whisper before he lifted a hand and said authoritatively:
"Stop!"
And as she had arrested the rush of her words, he had continued, in a grave, dry voice, quite devoid of unction or sympathy, cautiously lowered and yet wonderfully distinct: