‘Dear Heart, the trek is done!’”
Nathan had builded better than he ever knew. It was his!—and hers!—that noontime. The trek was done.
Madelaine’s eyes were starry, starry as they had never been before in all her days. This copper-hued, clear-eyed, lean-jawed, firm-voiced man was Nathaniel Forge! This was the one who had written a little poem which she had folded away in lavender and old lace and placed in a little casket deep beneath her Inner Shrine, turning piteously from the poignant fantasy that it could possibly have been meant for her.
Romance? What was Romance? This was Romance! This was Romance—the height and the depth and the width and the breadth of it—idealism unfathomable—the most beautiful thing in the world.
On a thousand nights in her orphaned heart she had wondered what he could be like, how he could appear, how his voice might sound. But that wonder had been forcibly sent away, off to the mystic vales behind the sunset where all our little unborn wishes go. Kismet, however, could be kind. This was a world after all in which action and reaction could be equal. There were still rewards and fairies. The man of her little heart-locked romance stood before her in the flesh at last. And he was all that she had ever dreamed a man could be and more.
Yes, it was all there,—all there on his face.
“Let us walk together, you and I,” said Madelaine, when her heart throbbed again and the great cog-wheels of the universe turned once more.
But in the woman’s suggestion lay a far deeper significance than Nathan grasped at the time.
IV
They fell into step and moved off, side by side, across the stubble. The sunshine sang and the breezes rioted. What mattered it that they stood in a land of blood and junk and chaos, with war roaring across the horizons and all the world on fire? There was a cobalt sky above them and the world stretched true into the western Infinite. It was a long way to the horizon, a very long way.