“Oh Hughie, what a home-coming!” she said. “I like to think that the trees are all decked out in their midsummer clothes to receive us, and the sun has been specially polished up to welcome us. Oh! and there’s the copse above which we climbed one morning, when I told you who Andrew Robb was. Do you remember?”
“No,” said Hugh gravely. “And there is the terrace where I told you something the next morning, and I can’t remember what that was, either.”
“And here’s the motor-car in which I tell you that there now sits the silliest boy in the world!” remarked his wife.
It was within a week of midsummer, and after they had dined they strolled out again into the garden to find that the reflections of sunset still lingered in the west, in bars and lines of crimson cloud floating like burning islands on a lake of saffron yellow. In that solemn and intense light everything seemed to glow with a radiance of its own: the huge, sunburned shoulder of the down above them seemed lit from within by some living flame and smouldered in the still evening air. An intenser green than ever the direct sunlight kindled burned in the towers of elm, and westward the river lay in pools of crimson. Then gradually, but in throbs and layers of darkness, the night began to flow like some clear incoming tide over the scene, drinking up the colours, as Edith had seen it once at Cookham, like some shy, wild beast. Stars were lit in the remote zenith, and again over the water-meadows below the skeins of mist spread their diaphanous expanses. And in the soft, confidential dusk Edith spoke of the event which was coming to the father of her child. New secrets of her woman’s sweet soul were given him; one thing only she kept back, that which Peggy had guessed, and was even now thinking of as the two walked gently up and down the garden-paths between the fragrance of the night-scented beds.
“And it will be then,” she said, “that our souls will be absolutely one, and I think it is that more than anything which a first-born child means to its mother. At least, so it seems to me. I cannot imagine two people being nearer to each other than we are, dear, but I know we shall be nearer yet. Hughie, I want you to promise me one thing.”
