At last my tongue’s strings became loosened. I stammered her name. For answer she uttered in a well-remembered voice, one word:
“Stuart!”
Next instant with a shriek of joy she was locked in my embrace, and my eager lips pressed passionately her dimples, those nests for kisses. In those joyful, dreamy moments we left remembrances unuttered, and nothing mingled with the sound of our kisses but a whispered word from Dora. When one finds living and well one’s love who was long ago lowered to the grave there is no need for the voice; a single look says more than a long speech.
Through the open windows the garden looked quite gay. The lawn grew thick and strong with its well-kept beds of crimson, white, scarlet and blue. Fresh air came in abundance from the open country, with puffs of all the pleasant perfumes of the flowers. The sweet scents seemed to fill Sybil with lassitude. She leant upon my arm quite faint, as if the smell had sent her off to sleep with love.
I glanced at her pale cheek and shell-like ear as her handsome head pillowed itself upon my breast. So delicate they seemed that, were it not for the rising and falling of her bosom, I should have believed she was of wax. But presently, struggling with the emotion that she had striven in vain to suppress, she raised her blue eyes to mine. They were still clear and trustful, childlike in their purity. I fancied I could read her reverie in their blue depths as she smiled upon me with sad sweetness.
“At last!” she murmured dreamily, her little hand gripping my arm convulsively. “At last you have come, Stuart!”
Her words caused a flood of memories to surge through my brain, and as she stood before me still pre-occupied, still mysterious, I felt myself doubting, even then, the reality of my joy. But, no! her presence was a tangible, inexplicable fact. Even at that moment a breath of violets filled my nostrils and again stirred my memory. Away in the Pyrenees long ago her chiffons had exuded that odour. Was it not her favourite perfume? The violets of spring, those modest blossoms snatched from the woods to droop and die in the hands of London flower-sellers, had always brought back to me memories of brief summer days when we had wandered up those distant mountain paths side by side, hand in hand, like children. I had thought of those distant things amidst the dust and clatter and gaiety of the great city, and ofttimes bought a bunch of those flowers, offspring of the dew and rising sun, and wore them in my coat so that I might feast my full on the bitter recollections of those days bygone when I had first seen the sun of a woman’s wondrous beauty.
But in my sudden ecstasy at finding her actually in my embrace, enraptured by her beauty and transported by her passionate kisses, I trod enchanted ground, knowing not what words fell from my lips.
Our questions were naïve and tender, our explanations brief and full of regrets and surprises. Happy in each other’s love, we uttered no word of reproach.
Suddenly I was conscious that Dora had approached, and was speaking.