The horror of the thought spurred him from his rigor of contemplation. That, at least, had been spared her. Destiny, then, had not meant for them that final, tragic consummation.
He threaded his way rapidly among the paths, the flower-beds, under the low boughs of the old fruit-trees. She had left the little door near the morning-room open for him, and through it he entered the still house.
It wasn’t escape, now, from her, but from that pressing horror, as of something, that, unless he hastened, might still overtake them both. Yet outside her door he paused, bent his head, listened with a strange curiosity, helpless before the nearness of that loved, that dreaded being, the warring note that he sought yet fled from.
She slept. Not a sound stirred in the room.
He closed his eyes, seeing, with a vividness that was almost a hallucination, her face, her wonderful face, asleep, with the dark rivers of her hair flowing about it.
And, fixed as he was in his frozen certainty of truth, he felt, once more like the striking of a hand across a harp, a longing, wild and passionate, to enter, to take her, sleeping, in his arms, to see her eyes open on him; to hide himself in life, as in the darkness of her breast and arms, and to forget forever the piercing of inexorable thought.
He found that his hand was on the lock and that he was violently trembling.
It was inexorable thought, the knowledge of the horror that would await them, that conquered the leap of blind instinct.
Half an hour later a thin, intense light rimmed all the eastern hills, and a cold, clear cheerfulness spread over the earth. The moors were purple and the sky overhead palely, immaculately blue. About the tall lime-trees the rooks circled, cawing, and a skylark sang far and high, a floating atom of ecstasy.
And in the clearness Gavan’s figure showed, walking rapidly away from the white house, down the road that led through the heather and past the birch-woods, walking away from it forever.
Grainger stood in Eppie’s little sitting-room, confronting, as Gavan had confronted the spring before, Miss Allen’s placidly sewing figure.
The flowers against which her uneventful head now bent were autumnal. Thickly growing Michaelmas daisies, white and purple, screened the lower section of the square outside. Above were the shabby tree-tops, that seemed heavily painted upon an equally solid sky. The square was dusty, the trees were dusty, the very blue of the sky looked grimed with dust.