We could neither of us move nor speak, and in the silence I remember hearing the creak of Dick’s shirt grow more rapid as his breathing quickened. Then, in a bush close at hand, a nightingale suddenly burst into bubbling song--no lament, as the Greeks thought it, but the lyric passion of mating-time, when the stir of love goes through the world, and the lion seeks the lioness, and the Libyan hills re-echo to the roaring of his irresistible need; when the feathered and bright-eyed birds lie breast to breast in their swaying habitations; when the man seeks the woman, and cannot rest till he has found her.
Then a flash of lightning, somewhat more vivid, lit up for a moment the lawn and the house, and she must have seen us there, for from her window came a little stifled exclamation, and before the thunder answered she was gone.
‘The storm is coming up,’ said Dick. ‘Let’s go indoors, and talk there. Besides, I’m as dry as dust, and I want a drink. We’ll go upstairs; all the lights are out down here.’
Our rooms were next each other, communicating by a door, and, drawing our chairs up to the window for coolness, we sat down.
‘Somehow or other we’ve got to settle it now,’ said he--‘settle it, that is, as far as we are able.’
How long we talked I do not know, but before we had finished we had to shut the window, for the storm came nearer, and burst round us in sheets of heavy rain and violet fires of lightning. Then it passed, and still we sat there, till at the end the moon came out, and rode high in a clean-washed heaven, with the stars clustering round her like swarming bees, while to the east the sky grew dove-coloured with the first hint of dawn. At last I rose.
‘It remains, then, just to toss,’ said I, and spun a coin.
‘It is. You speak to Margery first, then,’ I said.
He got up too, irresolute, and we looked at each other gravely, rivals in that which makes life sweet, but friends. And that makes life sweet, too.
‘And whatever happens, Jack,’ he said rather huskily, ‘we will do our very utmost not to let this stand between us, and to keep all knowledge of it from her.’
‘Yes, whatever happens,’ said I. ‘Time to go to bed, Dick. Good-night.’
I went into my room, closing the door of communication; but before I was half undressed it opened, and Dick came in.