"Perhaps he would if they had been more clever," hazarded Regina, in a low tone.
"Beauty is always supposed to be the great thing in a woman."
"Yes, the beauty attracts, but it does not rivet the chain it throws round the beholder. It is something else, mind or talent, that does that. In all the histories of the grandes passions of the world the woman has had a certain amount of beauty, of course, but she has always been clever too."
Mrs. Marlow looked up, surprised. Regina stirred her tea absently, gazing out into the sunlit garden.
"Well, he ought to have proposed to marry you, then," Mrs. Marlow said smilingly, without for an instant dreaming that was just what Everest had done. "You are clever enough and very pretty too."
Regina flushed rose-red and laughed. But when tea was over and she slipped away, her face was very sad again. She passed Everest's rooms on her way to her own and went in there. They stood in perfect order, just as they had been while he was in them. She took all the roses from the vases, the flowers she knew he had gathered and looked after himself, and took them away with her and went up slowly to her room. There she stood at the window looking out. It was the last day of June. He had been with them not quite a month. Three weeks she had had of absolute, unclouded happiness. There are a few human beings who can claim that much out of the whole of their life. Now, whatever the result, whatever the price she had to pay, she would never regret, never wish one moment of that perfect time obliterated.
Day after day passed slowly by, and to the girl, after that tremendous expenditure of energy, that intense excitement, it seemed as if her life literally stood still. In the soft, sombre quiet of the monotonous Rectory days she seemed to herself to have been wrapped up in cotton wool and buried. Was it possible that people like her sleepy sister Violet, and all the other twenty-eight unmarried ladies of Stossop, could go on existing like this, twenty—thirty—forty years, their whole life? Like flashes of hot light shot from a distant furnace came Everest's letters to her; they seemed to illumine the twilight of her quiet tomb. She went to the garden whenever it was fine, and sat there and dreamed of him beneath the waving trees, or hung over the balustrade looking down on to the sea, listening to its vital whispers and picturing his image in its deep purple mirrors. Her brain felt too tired to read or to learn, she neither played nor painted any more.
For the time he became her life.