"Well, what is fifteen miles?" he answered, smiling down into her upraised face. "Nothing, after fifty miles a day of cross country, as I have often had to do; and as to finding you, in comparison with the interior of Africa, Stossop's geography is pretty easy."
"How wonderful you are," she said softly, "and I am so glad you are here. I wanted to show you my garden. What do you think of it?"
"It is a beautiful place. It seems like those magic gardens one reads of. One can't believe it's just ordinary England."
"It is perfect to me now you are here. I was wishing so much for you to come."
"It must have been that which drew me here to you—darling."
He had not meant to use that word, nor any endearing term, but it passed his lips almost unconsciously; she did look such a darling in her pretty summer dress, with her fresh, pink-tinted face all aglow with her ardent, enthusiastic welcome of himself. And he knew, as he looked at the lovely, youthful form, that there was the spirit of a lioness within. She was a thing of life and light and fire; full to the brim, like himself, of ardent energy and power. There was no doll-like, sawdust body here, with brains of wool, as many of the women had had whom he had known, lovely though their outsides had been.
She attracted him violently, irrepressibly; there was an all-compelling magnet in each slender finger, as he touched her hand.
Nature does not take long in setting up her wondrous all but unbreakable current of electricity when she has brought together two individuals suitable to mate with each other, and just like that other common form of electricity which holds the hands relentlessly to a battery so that their owner has no power to lift or stir a finger, so does this other magnetic current sweep round its two captives, binding them together without will or power to move asunder.
At the word "darling" a quiver passed over Regina's face and she looked away as if she had not heard.