[151]

 

She whispered his name, very softly. What a serenity¹⁰ there is in such a moment, what a glow of secure happiness, of immunity¹¹ from the pains and sorrows of the world!

 

Robert Cairn, his arms about this girl, who, from his early boyhood, had been his ideal of womanhood, of love, and of all that love meant, forgot those things which had shaken his life and brought him to the threshold of death, forgot those evidences of illness which marred¹² the once glorious beauty of the girl, forgot the black menace of the future, forgot the wizard enemy whose hand was stretched over that house and that garden—and was merely happy.

 

But this paroxysm of gladness—which Eliphas Lévi, last of the Adepts¹³, has so marvellously analysed in one of his works—is of short duration, as are all joys. It is needless to recount, here, the broken sentences (punctuated with those first kisses which sweeten the memory of old age) that now passed for conversation, and which lovers have believed to be conversation since the world began. As dusk creeps over a glorious landscape, so the shadow of Antony Ferrara crept over the happiness of these two.

 

Gradually that shadow fell between them and the sun; the grim thing which loomed¹⁴ big in the lives of them both, refused any longer to be ignored. Robert Cairn, his arm about the girl's waist, broached¹⁵ the hated subject.

 

"When did you last see—Ferrara?"

 

Myra looked up suddenly.

 

"Over a week—nearly a fortnight, ago—"

 

"Ah!"

 

Cairn noted¹⁶ that the girl spoke¹⁷ of Ferrara with an odd sort of restraint for which he was at a loss to account. Myra had always regarded her guardian's adopted son in the light of a brother; therefore her present attitude was all the more singular.

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