“But I’d much rather talk about you,” he objected, and he waited, with his heart in his mouth, to see if she challenged that audacity.
“I’ve seen you only three times before to-night,” she said, staring off through a break in the shrubbery where a stretch of the lake lay like moving quicksilver.
“Well, a good deal can happen in that time,” he argued, wondering where his courage had gone.
“I’ve found that out,” she said with her Keswick candor.
He leaned closer to see her face. She did not move.
“Everything seemed clouded and hopeless before you came,” he heard her saying.
“Oh, you’re still thinking of the pictures,” he said, with a note of disappointment.
“I wish we didn’t have to think about them,” she told him.
He found something oddly inflammatory in that acknowledgment. “Then let’s not think about them,” he suggested. “Why should we, on a night like this?”
She did not answer him. But out of the prolonged silence that fell between them a tree toad shrilled sharply somewhere over their heads. He turned and stared across the garden at the distant house front. It seemed less sinister, bathed as it was in its etherealized wash of light. But it depressed him.
“I shouldn’t have asked you to do this,” he said, with remorse in his voice.
“It’s the most wonderful night I have ever known,” her small voice answered through the dusk.
“It is to me, too,” he told her, conscious of some gathering tide which was creeping up to him, which was taking possession of him, which was carrying him along on its tumbling and racing immensities.
“And it can never happen again,” she said, as much to herself as to him.
She sat back against the arbor railing, apparently startled by the passion in his voice.
“I’d rather you didn’t say things like that,” she told him.
“I want you to be always wonderful to me.”
“But I mean it,” he said, his voice shaking.
She stood up with what seemed her first gesture of timidity. He could see her face, flower soft, in the ragged square of moonlight which fell across her shoulders. He rose to his feet and stood beside her, with his pulses pounding. Then in the silence he reached out for her hand and turned her about so that she faced him.
“Don’t you see what it means to me?” he said, his face above hers in the uncertain light.