“You are making me do this mad thing.”
She had not troubled to put on a hat, and her face was white and clear and unhidden. Its air of desperate and purposeful frankness struck him. Her eyes looked straight at his, steadily and unflinchingly, with no subtle glances, no cunning of the lids.
“Let’s go down to the woods. Come!”
She spoke as though she had taken command of the crisis, snatched it out of his strong hands. And Canterton obeyed her. They went down the lane in the high shadow of the hedgerows and across the main road into the fir woods, neither of them uttering a word.
Eve paused when they had gone some two hundred yards into the woods. The canopy of boughs was a black vaulting, with here and there a crevice where the moonlight entered to fall in streaks and splashes upon the tree trunks and the ground. On every side were the crowding fir boles that blotted out the distance and obscured each other. The woodland floor was covered deep with pine needles, and from somewhere came the smell of bracken.
“Now, let me hear everything.”
He appeared a little in awe of her, and for the moment she was the stronger.
“I have told you all that there is to tell. I want you to be the bigger part of my life—the inward life that not another soul knows.”
“Not even Lynette?”
“She is but a child.”