England -- Fiction; Honeymoons -- Fiction; Love stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction
She had not answered that, though she had written every day, little,
friendly, intimate notes, telling him of every day's little happenings
and what were to be the happenings of the morrow. She told him, at last,
that the aunt was really going, and when. She wrote:
The aunts are going to Scotland and I shall be left to
see Aunt Alice off, and then, when she is gone, I will
write and make an assignation with my friend and
comrade, and we will go back to the good, green
country. It won't be all different, will it? People
meet again after years and don't recognize each other.
I suppose they have been changing, changing a little
bit every day. Do you think we shall have
changed--contrariwise? You one way and I the other, I
mean, so that when we do meet we sha'n't be the same?
The last letter of all was the shortest. "Monday," it said at the top of
its page, and then:
Auntie leaves Folkestone to-morrow by the morning
boat. I will let you know where to find me. Would
Thursday suit you, in the afternoon?
He had felt no doubt as to that. Thursday would not suit him--but
Tuesday would--and not the afternoon, but the morning. Had she really
thought that he would wait two days?
And now, lying on the turf, he read her letters through and laid his
face down on the last and dreamed a little, with closed eyes; and when
he lifted his head again the mist had grown thin as a bridal veil and
the sun was plain to be seen, showing a golden face above the sea, where
a million points of light gleamed like tinsel through a curtain of
gossamer. The air was warmer, the scent of the wild thyme sweeter and
stronger, and overhead, in the gray that was growing every moment
clearer and bluer, the skylarks were singing again.
"I knew," said Edward, as he went down toward the town where the smoke
of the newly lighted fires rose straight from the chimneys--"I knew it
couldn't have the heart not to be fine, on this day of all days."
He went back to his hotel and inspected once more certain of the
purchases he had made since her decree had banished him from London.
Resisting a momentary impulse toward asceticism in the matter of
breakfast, as an outward and visible testimony to the unimportance of
material things at such a time as this, he found himself at the other
end of the pendulum's swing, ordering just such a meal as he would have
ordered had she been with him, and ate his grape-fruit and omelette and
delicately browned fish with thoughtful appreciation, making of them a
banquet in her honor. He toasted her in the coffee, and, as he ate,
romance insisted that it was not himself, but her man, whom he was
treating to that perfectly served breakfast; and common sense added,
"Yes, and no man's at his best if he's hungry." Before he reached the
marmalade he had come to regard that impulse to tea and toast as a man
might regard a vanished temptation to alcoholic excess.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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