‘We shall both have added exactly one year to our experience,’ she said cheerfully, ‘and we shall begin life so much the more wisely.’
‘Shall we? Well, you can have the experience and the wisdom. I should like to have a Rip van Winkle sleep till then, and waken up just in time to give the necessary answers to the vicar. I say: have you been studying the service?’
‘What a question!’ she answered, blushing.
Of course she had gone over The Service more than once, with that sweet tremulous wonder—compound of curiosity, timid, only half-acknowledged anticipation and awe—which is inspired by those mysterious words that have the power of making two lives one. Was there ever a maiden passed her teens without doing and feeling so? Was there ever a maiden who has not strained her eyes into the misty future that overhangs the altar, and speculated upon the shape in which her fate was to appear? And what maiden was ever ready to make frank confession to her lover of those vague day-dreams in which he has had no definite existence?
‘To be sure you have,’ says Philip gaily, notwithstanding the feebleness of his voice; ‘but I have not. So you will have to coach me for the exam.—I mean the occasion.’
The sunshine of youth was still in their hearts, and they could talk with gay fearlessness of the responsibilities they were to take upon themselves by-and-by. That ‘By-and-by’ makes such a difference in our views of things: even the coward is brave whilst the battle is to be fought by-and-by.
In spite of broken bones and disappointment and restraint, they were pleasant days those to the lovers. Pleasanter still when Philip was declared out of danger, and was permitted to spend two of the sunny hours daily in the garden, which was still brilliant with flowers. ‘Nature and me to keep the place bonnie all the year round,’ Sam Culver used to say, and in the autumn especially, the combined forces produced marvellous effects.
Madge was with Philip in these little outings, wheeling his chair herself, in order that they might escape the tyranny of a servant’s attendance.
A dense high hedge of ancient boxwood, trimmed into the shape of a castle’s rampart, screened the kitchen-garden from the pleasure-grounds. A wide gravel-path divided this screen from a thicket of variegated evergreens. In the centre of the thicket was an open space where stood two silver beeches, and beneath them was a circular rustic seat.
This was a favourite resting-place of Philip and Madge—to read, to dream of the golden future; and it was here he first rebelled against the restraint of his wheel-chair. Autumn had faded into winter, when upon a certain day the lovers were seated together busily reading the letters which had been received that morning from Austin Shield.