Whereupon Alexis Triona thanked his stars for having led him along the true path.
Who can say that, in after years, these twain, when they shall have grown old and have gone through whatever furnaces Fate—either personal destiny or the Fate of Social Institutions—may prepare for them, will not retain imperishable memories of the idyll of that sweet spring day? There they sat, youth spiritually communing with youth; the girl urged by feminine instinct to love him for the dangers he had passed; the young man aflame with her beauty, her charm, her dryad elusiveness. Here, for him, was yet another aspect of her, free, unseizable in the woodland setting. And for her, another aspect of him, the simple, clean-cut Englishman, divested of vague and disquieting Russian citizenship, the perfect companion, responsive to every chord struck by the spirit of the magic afternoon. In the years to come, who can say that they will not remember this sweet and delicate adventure of their souls creeping forth in trembling reconnaissance one of the other? Perhaps it will be a more precious memory to the woman than to the man. Men do not lay things up in lavender as women do.
If he had spoken, declared his passion in lover’s set terms, perhaps her heart might have been caught by the glamour of it all, and she might have surrendered to his kisses, and they might have journeyed back to London in a state of unreprehensible yet commonplace beatitude. And the memory would possibly have been marked by a white stone rising stark in an airless distance. But he did not speak, held back by a rare reverence of her maidenhood and her perfect trust; and in her heart flowered gratitude for his sensitiveness to environment. So easy for a maladroit touch to mar the perfection of an exquisite hour of blue mist and mystery. So, again, who knows but that in the years to come the memory will be marked by a fragrance, a shimmer of leaves, a haze over green sward, incorporated impalpably with the dear ghost of an immortal day?
They returned on the top of the omnibus, rather late, and on the way they spoke little. Now and then he glanced sideways at her and met her eyes and caught her smile, and felt content. At the terminus of the omnibus route, in the raging, busy precincts of the stations of Victoria, they alighted. He walked with her to her door in Victoria Street.
“Your words have been singing in my ears,” said he: “ ‘I love big things.’ To me, to-day has seemed a big thing.”
“And I’ve loved it,” she replied.
“True?”
“True.”
She sped up to her room somewhat dazed, conscious of need to keep her balance. So much had happened in the last four-and-twenty hours. The shudder of the night had still horrified her flesh when she drew the young man out into the wide daylight and the open air; and now it had passed away, as though it had never been, and a new quivering of youth, taking its place, ran like laughter through her bodily frame and her heart and her mind.
“H’m. Your outing seems to have done you good,” said the impassive Myra, letting her in.