“Oh!” she said. She withdrew her hand. “Oh, Belovedest, how can you say such a thing!”
“You yourself,” laughed John, “asked whether it was months or years since we talked of it.”
“I 've never stopped thinking about it,” she protested, and she went on protesting. But, like the Shakspearian lady, she protested too much.
“You've grown up, Stellamaris,” said John.
But how much of the old fairy-tale she still believed in he could not gauge. He went away, man with the muck-rake that he was, with the uncomfortable conviction that the roots of her child's faith survived.
And yet she had grown up, and John, for the life of him, could not understand it. He was puzzled, because the sweet reverence of the man for the thing of sea-foam and cloud mystery that she had been to him all his man's life could not dream of physiological development. She was longer and broader; that met the eye. Living in her extraordinary seclusion from the multitudinous winds of earth, she could feel no breath of the storms that shake humanity into the myriad moulds of character. The physical side (other than mere linear and cubical expansion) apart, there was no possibility of change from childhood to womanhood. But John counted without his host—Nature, the host who claims reckoning from us all, kick though we may against her tyrannies; Nature, with her frank indecencies, her uncompromising, but loving, realism. The physical side in the development of any human being cannot be set apart. That passage of every maiden across the ford where brook and river meet is accomplished without a good, careless man's knowledge or conjecture. He kisses her to-day, as he has kissed her since she toddled with bare legs, and she responds, and it means little more to her than an acidulated drop. He shall kiss her to-morrow, and she shall grow as red as any turkey-cock, and cast down her eyes, and go through all the pretty antics characteristic, since the beginning of time, of a self-conscious sex. And the man shall go away scratching his head in a deuce of a puzzle.
Another year passed. Stella was twenty-one. The routine of the Channel House, of the house at Kilburn, of the Fulham flat, went on unchanged and unchanging. Time seems unimportant as a positive agent in human affairs. It is the solvent of sorrow, but it cannot create joy. From its benumbing influence no drama seems to spring. It is events—and events, too, no matter how trivial—that have their roots mysteriously deep in time that shake the world and make the drama which we call history. And it was an event, apparently trivial, but sudden, unlooked for, amazing, that shook the lives whose history is here recorded.
One morning, in obedience to a peremptory telegram from Sir Oliver Blount, John Risca met him at the Imperial Club. The old man rose from his seat near the entrance of the smoking-room into which John was shown, and excitedly wrung both his hands. “My dear boy, you must come to Southcliff at once.” Two or three times before he had been brought down post-haste by Sir Oliver, only to find himself needed as a mediator between husband and wife. He shook himself free.
“Out of the question, Oliver. I 'm overwhelmed with work. I 've got my syndicate article to do, and the review goes to press to-night.”
“You don't understand. It 's our darling Stella. This morning she lifted her head from the pillow.”