"This is the south terrace," Anna said. "Should you like towalk down to the river?"She seemed to listen to herself speaking from a far-off airyheight, and yet to be wholly gathered into the circle ofconsciousness which drew its glowing ring about herself andDarrow. To the aerial listener her words sounded flat andcolourless, but to the self within the ring each one beatwith a separate heart.
It was the day after Darrow's arrival, and he had come downearly, drawn by the sweetness of the light on the lawns andgardens below his window. Anna had heard the echo of hisstep on the stairs, his pause in the stone- flagged hall,his voice as he asked a servant where to find her. She wasat the end of the house, in the brown-panelled sitting-roomwhich she frequented at that season because it caught thesunlight first and kept it longest. She stood near thewindow, in the pale band of brightness, arranging somesalmon-pink geraniums in a shallow porcelain bowl. Everysensation of touch and sight was thrice-alive in her. Thegrey- green fur of the geranium leaves caressed her fingersand the sunlight wavering across the irregular surface ofthe old parquet floor made it seem as bright and shifting asthe brown bed of a stream.
Darrow stood framed in the door-way of the farthest drawing-room, a light-grey figure against the black and whiteflagging of the hall; then he began to move toward her downthe empty pale-panelled vista, crossing one after anotherthe long reflections which a projecting cabinet or screencast here and there upon the shining floors.
As he drew nearer, his figure was suddenly displaced by thatof her husband, whom, from the same point, she had so oftenseen advancing down the same perspective. Straight, spare,erect, looking to right and left with quick precise turns ofthe head, and stopping now and then to straighten a chair oralter the position of a vase, Fraser Leath used to marchtoward her through the double file of furniture like ageneral reviewing a regiment drawn up for his inspection.
At a certain point, midway across the second room, he alwaysstopped before the mantel-piece of pinkish-yellow marble andlooked at himself in the tall garlanded glass thatsurmounted it. She could not remember that he had everfound anything to straighten or alter in his own studiedattire, but she had never known him to omit the inspectionwhen he passed that particular mirror.
When it was over he continued more briskly on his way, andthe resulting expression of satisfaction was still on hisface when he entered the oak sitting-room to greet hiswife...
The spectral projection of this little daily scene hung butfor a moment before Anna, but in that moment she had time tofling a wondering glance across the distance between herpast and present. Then the footsteps of the present cameclose, and she had to drop the geraniums to give her hand toDarrow...
"Yes, let us walk down to the river."They had neither of them, as yet, found much to say to eachother. Darrow had arrived late on the previous afternoon,and during the evening they had had between them Owen Leathand their own thoughts. Now they were alone for the firsttime and the fact was enough in itself. Yet Anna wasintensely aware that as soon as they began to talk moreintimately they would feel that they knew each other lesswell.
They passed out onto the terrace and down the steps to thegravel walk below. The delicate frosting of dew gave thegrass a bluish shimmer, and the sunlight, sliding in emeraldstreaks along the tree-boles, gathered itself into greatluminous blurs at the end of the wood-walks, and hung abovethe fields a watery glory like the ring about an autumnmoon.
"It's good to be here," Darrow said.
They took a turn to the left and stopped for a moment tolook back at the long pink house-front, plainer, friendlier,less adorned than on the side toward the court. Soprolonged yet delicate had been the friction of time uponits bricks that certain expanses had the bloom and textureof old red velvet, and the patches of gold lichen spreadingover them looked like the last traces of a dim embroidery.
The dome of the chapel, with its gilded cross, rose aboveone wing, and the other ended in a conical pigeon-house,above which the birds were flying, lustrous and slatey,their breasts merged in the blue of the roof when theydropped down on it.
"And this is where you've been all these years."They turned away and began to walk down a long tunnel ofyellowing trees. Benches with mossy feet stood against themossy edges of the path, and at its farther end it widenedinto a circle about a basin rimmed with stone, in which theopaque water strewn with leaves looked like a slab of gold-flecked agate. The path, growing narrower, wound oncircuitously through the woods, between slender serriedtrunks twined with ivy. Patches of blue appeared above themthrough the dwindling leaves, and presently the trees drewback and showed the open fields along the river.
They walked on across the fields to the tow-path. In acurve of the wall some steps led up to a crumbling pavilionwith openings choked with ivy. Anna and Darrow seatedthemselves on the bench projecting from the inner wall ofthe pavilion and looked across the river at the slopesdivided into blocks of green and fawn-colour, and at thechalk-tinted village lifting its squat church-tower and greyroofs against the precisely drawn lines of the landscape.
Anna sat silent, so intensely aware of Darrow's nearnessthat there was no surprise in the touch he laid on her hand.
They looked at each other, and he smiled and said: "Thereare to be no more obstacles now.""Obstacles?" The word startled her. "What obstacles?""Don't you remember the wording of the telegram that turnedme back last May? 'Unforeseen obstacle': that was it. Whatwas the earth-shaking problem, by the way? Finding agoverness for Effie, wasn't it?""But I gave you my reason: the reason why it was anobstacle. I wrote you fully about it.""Yes, I know you did." He lifted her hand and kissed it.
"How far off it all seems, and how little it all matterstoday!"She looked at him quickly. "Do you feel that? I suppose I'mdifferent. I want to draw all those wasted months intotoday--to make them a part of it.""But they are, to me. You reach back and take everything--back to the first days of all."She frowned a little, as if struggling with an inarticulateperplexity. "It's curious how, in those first days, too,something that I didn't understand came between us.""Oh, in those days we neither of us understood, did we? It'spart of what's called the bliss of being young.""Yes, I thought that, too: thought it, I mean, in lookingback. But it couldn't, even then, have been as true of youas of me; and now----""Now," he said, "the only thing that matters is that we'resitting here together."He dismissed the rest with a lightness that might haveseemed conclusive evidence of her power over him. But shetook no pride in such triumphs. It seemed to her that shewanted his allegiance and his adoration not so much forherself as for their mutual love, and that in treatinglightly any past phase of their relation he took somethingfrom its present beauty. The colour rose to her face.
"Between you and me every............