“Yes, Jim—if she finds that out.... And thank you for—asking me—so sweetly.”... She turned sharply and looked out over a valley suddenly blurred.
For it had been otherwise with her in years gone by, and men had spoken then quite as plainly but differently. Only d’Eblis, burnt out, done for, and obsessed, had wearily and unwillingly advanced that far.... And Ferez, too; but that was unthinkable of a creature in whom virtue and vice were of the same virus.
Looking blindly out over the valley she said:
“If my Government deals justly with me, then I shall go to France with you as your comrade. If I ever find that I love you I will be your wife.... Until then——” She stretched out her hand, not looking around at him; and they exchanged a quick, firm clasp.
And so matters progressed between, these two—rather ominously for Barres, in case he entertained any really serious sentiments in regard to Thessalie. And, recently, he had been vaguely conscious that he entertained something or other concerning the girl which caused him to look with slight amazement and unsympathetic eyes upon the all too obvious behaviour of his comrade Westmore.
At present he was standing in the summer house which terminated the blossoming tunnel of the rose arbour, watching water falling into a stone basin from the fishy mouth of a wall fountain, and wondering where Thessalie and Westmore had gone.
Dulcie, in a thin white frock and leghorn hat, roaming entranced and at hazard over lawn and through shrubbery and garden, encountered him there, still squinting abstractedly at the water spout.
It was the first time the girl had seen him since their arrival at Foreland Farms. And now, as she paused under the canopy of fragrant rain-drenched roses and looked at this man who had made all this possible for her, she suddenly felt the change within herself, fitting her for it all—a subtle metamorphosis completing itself within her—the final accomplishment of a transmutation, deep, radical, permanent.
For her, the stark, starved visage which Life had worn had relaxed; in the grim, forbidding wall which had closed her horizon, a door opened, showing a corner of a world where she knew, somehow, she belonged.