So the woman he desired lay at last against Fortuné de la Vireville's breast, and up from the sea of gorse in which they stood welled the warm honey-sweet scent that is like no other in the world to steal away the heart. The wind had dropped to a caress; it caught at Raymonde's gown no longer, and out over the illimitable wrinkled blue, from the height on which they stood, the poised gulls looked like slowly drifting flecks of snow. But out over there was also the long purple line of Jersey, and his pledged word. Time was all too short. As long as he lived the scent of gorse would always bring this hour to him, but the actual hour itself was measured with very few sands. "Will you come back with me now to Guernsey, to your brother, Raymonde?" he asked softly, stooping his head. "Yes," she answered, without moving. Her voice sounded like a voice in a dream. "And I will return from Jersey, and we will be married at once?" "Yes," she said again. "My God, I can't believe it!" said Fortuné to himself, and kissed her once more. So they went together to the little farm, itself named from the gorse, the Clos-ajonc, to tell her pensioners that she was leaving them immediately. And, no doubt to show that she did not consider him so maimed as to be incapable of affording her support, Raymonde leant all the way upon his arm. CHAPTER XXXIX FLOWER OF THE FOAM La Vireville did not go into the little Clos-ajonc with his lady. He waited for her outside, leaning upon its low, whitewashed wall, over which the tamarisk whispered with its feathery foliage. Breaths of the gorse came to him even here, and the whole warm air was vibrating with the lark's ecstasy. And Fortuné could hardly believe his happiness, so strange a thing to him. Old dreams, long put away, came back to him, merged in the new. Had he not yearned sometimes, despite himself, to have, in what remained of this hard and shifting existence of his, brief enough in its pleasures but endless in its unceasing fatigue and peril and anxiety--the life that was often no better than a hunted animal's--to have one place that was home, and shrine, and star? Well, he had his desire now; he had won that place, that heart, at last. Yet even as he leant there, absorbed in contemplation, his mind was suddenly pierced with a most evil arrow of a thought. What if Raymonde had taken him out of pity, as a woman sometimes will . . . or worse, out of a sense of gratitude?