‘What is it, dearest?’ I asked, ‘and why do your eyes bring questions?’
‘You sighed,’ she answered, smiling a little sadly; ‘and sighed so deeply. You are in pain again. The darkness, perhaps, is over you?’ And her hand stole out to meet my own. ‘You are in pain?’
‘Not physical pain,’ I said, ‘and not _the_ darkness either. I see _you_ clearly,’ and would have told her more, as I carried her soft fingers to my lips, had I not divined from the expression in her eyes that she read my heart and knew all my strange, mysterious forebodings in herself.
‘I know,’ she whispered before I could find speech, ‘for I feel it too. It is the shadow of separation that oppresses you--yet of no common, measurable separation you can understand. Is it not that?’
Leaning over then, I took her close into my arms, since words in that moment were mere foolishness. I held her so that she could not get away; but even while I did so it was like trying to hold the spring, or fasten the flying hour with a fierce desire. All slipped from me, and my arms caught at the sunshine and the wind.
‘We have both felt it all these weeks,’ she said bravely, as soon as I had released her, ‘and we both have struggled to conceal it. But now----’ she hesitated for a second, and with so exquisite a tenderness that I would have caught her to me again but for my anxiety to hear her further words--‘now that you are well, we may speak plainly to each other, and so lessen our pain by sharing it.’ And then she added, still more softly: ‘You feel there is “something” that shall take you from me--yet what it is you cannot discover nor divine. Tell me, Félix--all your thought, that I in turn may tell you mine.’
Her voice floated about me in the sunny air. I stared at her, striving to focus the dear face more clearly for my sight. A shower of apple blossoms fell about us, and her words seemed floating past me like those passing petals of white. They drifted away. I followed them with difficulty and confusion. With the wind, I fancied, a veil of indefinable change slipped across her face and eyes.
‘Yet nothing that could alter feeling,’ I answered; for she had expressed my own thought completely. ‘Nor anything that either of us can control. Only--perhaps, that everything must fade and pass away, just as this glory of the spring must fade and pass away----’