Her heart choked her. They moved on together shoulder to shoulder, her elbow resting in the bend of his strong arm, and her hand lying in his. The air they breathed was sweet with heady, nameless fragrance, the burning golden light that haloed them seemed the effluence of their love. Anguish and rapture mingled in the chalice of the perfect hour for Patrine. Nothing but rapture was in the draught for Sherbrand, though a faint fold showed between his eyebrows as he said suddenly:
"Hang it! I've forgotten to ask the Station fellows to give me a night's shakedown. However, there's a decent hotel in Seasheere. My bag is still in the machine, by the way.... Did you send someone on to the cottage with your traps?"
"I——"
She began to falter. It was coming.... But his eagerness delayed the moment of revelation. The track they followed dipped down and they found themselves in a grassy basin. The turf cupped up on every side and they were alone, lidded by the blazing turquoise sky.
At the bottom of the green nest he stopped, and next moment his embrace enveloped her. She forgot, as an answering flame burned in her blood, all the things that she had meant to say. "I'll have my hour," shot through her whirling brain, "I must have something of him to keep in remembrance. He has never loved me—nor I him—so passionately as now. Oh, my God!"
He released her with a happy sigh, and they sat down on the shadowed side of their green nest, a deep dimple in the cheek of the sunny, smiling Earth, and looked in each other's eyes. He said, as she took off her hat and threw it aside and turned her unveiled, unshadowed face back to his:
"Your dear cheeks are thinner, I fancy, Pat. Have you been worrying much about me?"
She nodded, thinking of her sleepless nights passed after reading his few letters, or when his letters had failed to come.
"Pretty badly—in the days of the Retreat from Mons. You piloted that French officer over the Channel and—whiff!—you vanished. What has become of him?"
"Wing Commandant Raymond? He's riding the storm and directing the whirlwind somewhere on the French Front. I got my orders to join the R.F.C.-unit acting with a rearguard battery of the Second Army Corps as soon as I'd dumped him. As for the work with the battery, it was always the same thing. We flew out against von Kluck's advance, spotting their gun-emplacements and getting the range for our gunners. And under us a dark-brown river with five branches rolled South. And that was the Retreat."