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VI

WITHIN HER PARADISE

Priscilla’s reply to her stepmother’s summons, written several days later, was a highly unsatisfactory epistle indeed, in the opinion of its recipient. She found it quite impossible to tear herself away from the country while the fine weather lasted, she wrote. She was enjoying herself immensely, and did not feel that she could ever endure the whole of a London season in one dose again.

It was not a well-thought-out letter, being written in a haste that made itself obvious between the lines. Carfax had hired a motor-car, and was waiting for her. They went miles that day, and when they stopped at last they were in a country that she scarcely knew–a country of barren downs and great sunlit spaces, lonely, immense.

“This is the place,” said Carfax quietly, as he helped her to alight.

Priscilla walked a few paces and stood still. She knew exactly why he had chosen it. Her heart was beating wildly. It seemed to dominate all her other faculties. She felt it to be almost more than she could bear.

Those moments of unacknowledged waiting were terrible to her. She knew she had taken an irrevocable step, and her free instinct clamoured loudly against it. It amounted almost to a panic within her.

There came a quiet step on the turf behind her. She did not turn, but the suspense became suddenly unendurable. With a convulsive movement, she made as if she would go on. At the same instant an arm encircled her, checked her, held her closely.

“So, sweetheart!” said Julian Carfax, his voice soothing, womanly, but possessing withal a note of vitality, of purpose, that she had never heard in it before.

She suffered his hold with a faint but desperate cry.

“You don’t know me,” she said, with a gasping effort. “You don’t–” The words failed. He was pressing her to him ever more closely, and she felt his fingers gently fumbling at her veil. With a sudden passionate movement she put up both hands, and threw it back.

“There!” she said, with a sound, half laugh, half sob, and turned herself wholly to him.

The next instant, as his lips pressed hers, all the anguish of doubt that had come upon her was gone like an evil spirit from her soul. She knew only that they stood alone together in a vast space that was filled to the brim with the noonday sunshine. All her heart was flooded with rejoicing. The gates had opened wide for her, and she had entered in.

VII

BACK TO EARTH

Priscilla never quite realised afterwards how it was that the whole of that long summer day slipped by and her confession remained still unspoken. She did make one or two attempts to lead round to the subject, but each seemed to be foredoomed to failure, and at last she abandoned the idea–for that day, at least. It seemed, after all, but a paltry thing in face of her great happiness.

They sped homeward at length in the light of a cloudless sunset, smoothly and swiftly as if they swooped through air.

“I will take you to the edge of the park,” Carfax said; and when they reached it he took her in his arms, holding her fast, as if he could not bear to let her go.

They parted at last almost in silence, but with the tacit understanding that they would meet in the glen on the following day.

Priscilla walked home through the lengthening shadows with a sense of wonderment and unreality at her heart. He had asked for no pledge, yet she knew that the bond between them was such as might stretch to the world’s end and never break. They belonged to each other irrevocably now, whatever might intervene.

She reached the Abbey, walking as in a maze of happiness, with no thought for material things.

Romeo came to greet her with effusion, and an air of having something to tell her. She fondled him, and went on with him into the house. They entered by a conservatory, and so through the shrouded drawing-room into the great hall.