The Faraway Woman left him now to go to the child.
4
Returning, she put the kettle on, and made tea in the earthen pot. To Bellair her coming into the room again was a replenishment—as if she had been gone for hours; and this started a pang deep in his heart, which presently suffused everything when he realised that his ship had come for him. It was past midnight.... In reality it was to-morrow that his ship would sail.
“You listen wonderfully,” she said.
“It seems all about the little Gleam,” he answered. “It makes everything significant about the open boat.... I forget to swallow——”
They laughed together.
“Do you know, I can hardly realise when we are here—that this is New Zealand?” she said presently, “that only a little way back is the long road and the river and the ravine—the neighbour’s house and ours and the other houses between.... I will tell you the rest very quickly—and oh, let me tell you first, I am not afraid. In spite of all I know, I am not——”
She was bending forward across the table.
“... I was a woman when Paul came back from the distant city—and came first of all to me. He was changed—something excellent about his face and carriage, and something I did not understand at all, his face deeper lined, his voice lower, his words ready. I did not think about him when he was away. In the first evenings we passed together, I had only an old-time laugh for him. I kissed him with something like affection. We were permitted to be alone together, and I saw the old look upon my father’s face—that I had hated so. That look—even before the playmate thing had departed from me. Then I began to see Paul—something I could not like nor understand, a readiness of words, and he was not wise enough to make them ring deeply. I seemed to be studying in him the novelty of a man—through the eyes of a girl.
“One night we were together in my father’s house. It was our Spring and raining softly on the steps. The grass seemed full of odours, and the vines trembling with life. He kissed me there. It seemed that I hardly knew. I was looking over his shoulder into the dark, and I saw a little white face. It was like a rain-washed flower ... and to me it was quite everything.