Apropos of the promised spectacle, Barres observed to Dulcie that there happened to be no moon, and consequently no moonlight, but the girl, now delightfully excited by glimpses of Hohenlinden festooned with electricity, gaily reproached him for being literal.
“If one is happy,” she said, “a word is enough to satisfy one’s imagination. If they call it a moonlight spectacle, I shall certainly see moonlight whether it’s there or not!”
“They may call it heaven, too, if they like,” he said, “and I’ll believe it—if you are there.”
At that she blushed furiously:
“Oh, Garry! You don’t mean it, and it’s silly to say it!”
“I mean it all right,” he muttered, as the car swung in through the great ornamental gates of Hohenlinden. “The trouble is that I mean so much—and you mean so much to me—that I don’t know how to express it.”
The girl, her face charmingly aglow, looked straight in front of her out of enchanted eyes, but her heart’s soft violence in her breast left her breathless and mute; and when the car stopped she scarcely dared rest her hand on the arm which Barres presented to guide her in her descent to earth.
It may have been partly the magnificence of Hohenlinden that so thrillingly overwhelmed her as she seated herself with Garry on the marble terrace of an amphitheatre among brilliant throngs already gathered to witness the eagerly discussed spectacle.
And it really was a bewilderingly beautiful scene, there under the summer stars, where a thousand rosy lanterns hung tinting the still waters of the little stream 371 that wound through the clipped greensward which was the stage.
The foliage of a young woodland walled in this vernal scene; the auditorium was a semi-circle of amber marble—rows of low benches, tier on tier, rising to a level with the lawn above.