“My dearest!” he cried, and would have seized her in his arms again but for a look of supplication. That he had in him this innate and unsuspected chivalry filled her with an exquisite sweetness.
“You will—protect me?” she asked.
“With my life and with my honour,” he answered. “Honora, there will be no happiness like ours.”
“I wish I knew,” she sighed: and then, her look returning from the veil, rested on him with a tenderness that was inexpressible. “I—I don't care, Hugh. I trust you.”
The sun was setting. Slowly they went back together through the paths of the tangled garden, which had doubtless seen many dramas, and the courses changed of many lives: overgrown and outworn now, yet love was loth to leave it. Honora paused on the lawn before the house, and looked back at him over her shoulder.
“How happy we could have been here, in those days,” she sighed.
“We will be happier there,” he said.
Honora loved. Many times in her life had she believed herself to have had this sensation, and yet had known nothing of these aches and ecstasies! Her mortal body, unattended, went out to dinner that evening. Never, it is said, was her success more pronounced. The charm of Randolph Leffingwell, which had fascinated the nobility of three kingdoms, had descended on her, and hostesses had discovered that she possessed the magic touch necessary to make a dinner complete. Her quality, as we know, was not wit: it was something as old as the world, as new as modern psychology. It was, in short, the power to stimulate. She infused a sense of well-being; and ordinary people, in her presence, surprised themselves by saying clever things.
Lord Ayllington, a lean, hard-riding gentleman, who was supposed to be on the verge of contracting an alliance with the eldest of the Grenfell girls, regretted that Mrs. Spence was neither unmarried nor an heiress.
“You know,” he said to Cecil Grainger, who happened to be gracing his wife's dinner-party, “she's the sort of woman for whom a man might consent to live in Venice.”