But Ariel seemed to like it. And, in fact, she did. Michael Schwankovsky’s warm, strong, great hand holding her wrist with such gentle firmness was regulating those leaden heartbeats back to normality. Kindness andsoundnesswere transmitted through those strong, firm fingers to her consciousness. From her very first meeting with Michael Schwankovsky she had felt at home with him. And by now, quite simply, she had come to love him very much. Glenn could understand nothing of this. He sat between Ariel and his brother, trying not to care that Schwankovsky was keeping Ariel physically prisoner by that wrist, trying not to hear what seemed to him the mawkish tenderness in the booming voice that shattered, to his senses, against Ariel’s delicate reserves so unforgivably.
And Hugh was thinking, “This is going to be an awful evening!” It stretched away before him, a desert of aridity, where Ariel would be kept close at Schwankovsky’s side, his mother and Joan would discuss psychoanalysis and the comparative merits of its different schools endlessly, and Anne, Glenn and this Frye fellow would keep the radio going over all. If it fell out that way, he could not go on with it. His nerves were taut.
And then those taut nerves hummed like telephone wires in a storm as he caught the look of tortured disgust on Glenn’s features as the boy’s eyes turned from Ariel’s prisoned wrist. “What right has Glenn to care like that!” Hugh cried to himself. “He’s too young to know really how to love her!”
But after dinner, to Hugh’s vast relief, the radio was overlooked. It was a warm, still, moon-flooded night, and as a matter of course the entire little party wandered out to the terrace and settled itself in garden chairs there. Only Joan sat on the balustrade, leaned her shoulder against an urn, and beckoned Hugh with her lighted cigarette to come beside her. She was silent, in spite of being hostess, and he was silent with her for some time, while the others talked. To Joan, the silence between herself and the figure so close to her side was pregnant as none of their other silences had ever been. It was the darkness in which her moment of surrender was germinating. She had told Doctor Steiner at their final conference on the subject this morning that she was going to give marriage with Hugh at least its trial.
Mrs. Weyman had taken it upon herself to play hostess for the so unusually obscured Joan. And Joan blessed her future mother-in-law for that. But for all her activity, Mrs. Weyman was not so oblivious as she appeared to be of the two very quiet people withdrawn there from the social group in the dark shadow of the great urn. Her eyes wandered in their direction constantly, and she was deeply excited and hopeful. She, like Anne and Ariel, had her “hunch” that to-night might make Hugh supremely happy. Meanwhile, she was doing her best to keep the social atmosphere from requiring Joan’s attentions by being particularly entertaining herself; and this in spite of Glenn’s unhelpful somberness, Anne’s staccato and unnatural cheerfulness, and that strange creature Michael Schwankovsky’s bearish gambolings. Ariel was not counting, so far as Mrs. Weyman was aware, either for or against her efforts at harmonizing the little group. She was too elusive out here by moonlight, where her voice, flat and pebble cool, was heard only now and then in some quite commonplace, careful answer to somebody’s direct question to her. In Charlie Frye she found her stand-by. Mrs. Weyman put him down, once and for all, in her mental notebook this night as a perfect filler-in for future dinner parties at Wild Acres.
“Come along, Ariel!” Schwankovsky boomed suddenly, interrupting Charlie Frye in a really amusing anecdote he was telling. “The time has come when you must dance for me. I will make the music. We shall not be together again for months. Unbearable to think it! So for my consolation you are to dance now!”
His arm around her shoulder, he was drawing Ariel into the lighted music room and toward the piano with him.
“Oh, Ariel! How delicious! Please do,” Anne cried, jumping up and turning over her chair in her relief at something at last happening in the breathless atmosphere of the terrace. And she followed them in, leaving Charlie Frye’s story hanging in mid-air, just as it was, half told. Mrs. Weyman could do nothing to rescue his anecdote for the embarrassed young man. She could only get up, with him, and follow the noise into the drawing-room, where they sat beside each other, two defeated social captains, on a little Queen Anne sofa, just inside the long window through which they had entered.
“This may be interesting. Do you suppose she will?” Joan asked, out in the dark, putting her hand through Hugh’s arm and edging him along the railing to a better view of the interior.
Schwankovsky was playing MacDowell’s “Water Lily.” Ariel was sitting on the end of the piano bench, while Anne bent over her, begging her please to dance, and Glenn stood before her, adding his urgings. Then suddenly Anne was kneeling before Ariel. She was stripping off Ariel’s silver slippers and her stockings.
Hugh moved abruptly, and Joan’s hand fell lifeless through his arm and to her side. Hugh was striding toward the windows.
Ariel was his, in a manner, after all. Her father had given her to him in a way that made his concern imperative. And this was all simply crazy. Schwankovsky was just an insufferable buffoon. And Anne and Glenn were idiots—
But Ariel was standing, straight and unabashed in her violet-blue, wood-smoke dress that was made from Grandam’s scarf, the folds of the skirt falling about her bare legs, her high-arched, slim feet very white against the gray velvet rug that covered the floor in there.
Hugh halted inside the window. Schwankovsky was saying with almost an hypnotic look and voice, “Forget all about us, my Ariel. Even the music. Remember your beach, and the smooth floor of sand down between the rocks. Remember the loggia and the path through the cedars. Remember the violets and the roses.”
He was playing “The Water Lily” as he talked, but stopped and changed abruptly into something that might be César Franck’s, but nothing of his that Hugh knew. Hugh had not realized before that Schwankovsky could play,—and play like this! The big man was looking beyond Ariel, as if he himself saw the clouds, the beach, felt the rhythms of earth, sky and water, that were pouring through his music. Hugh could not go forward. He dared not break into the Forces of Beauty which even he, Philistine that he was, could feel gathering in that room.
Ariel started walking away from the piano, slowly. She was coming directly toward Hugh, but it was obvious that she did not see him, or the others there, against the wall of the room. She was walking forward into the world which Schwankovsky had given her back suddenly, when she was unhappiest and needed it most.
And Mrs. Weyman and Charlie Frye, Anne, Glenn, Hugh, and even Joan—out on the dark terrace—were being drawn with the slow pacing of those bare feet over the gray rug into a simple state of harmony with—the cosmic rhythms? Ariel drew them with her, Ariel and Schwankovsky’s music together,—drew them forward, forward, out—out—out beyond the confines of the room, even farther than the boundaries of their individual desires and passions, into a state of identification with the intentions of the universe. They were, all of them, pressing forward along with Ariel’s poised, spiritualized body, her bare, sure feet, and the music,—straight into the heart of Beauty....
When she began to dance, she did not dancetothe music. She dancedinit. In the music, moving in it as if she were the fire at the heart of its purity, she danced to Life. First it was elemental life, the rhythms of earth, sky, water. Her face stayed immobile. She was as impersonal as the music. Only her body spoke. Much of the time her head was dropped, so that the immobile features were shadowed in her hair, as in the pictures where her father had painted her dancing. This was at the beginning of the dance....
But as Ariel had walked from Schwankovsky’s side and out onto her home beach, and there unified herself with the rhythmical universe, soon she moved forward again into a new aspect. She danced still from within the music and at one with rhythms of earth. But now she was dancing before the Face of Love. She danced before the Face of her love of her father, who had painted her dancing. She danced before the Face of his present happiness, in which she believed utterly. She soon danced before the Face of her own grief and loss.... She danced before the Face of her love and comradeship with Grandam—Grandam, who now was coming close, close to the edge of life....
Finally, she danced before the Face of her religion, her belief in love, in life, in the life beyond death.
This was all so personal and poignant that Hugh would have had to turn away and not go on watching if it were not that Ariel’s dear face remained impassive. It might have been carved from still jade, white and luminous, but impassive. Or, no,—it was like the face of a flower whose expression a self-enwrapped mortal cannot read. Hugh was grateful with his whole heart that Ariel’s face was only a flower floating on the stream of the dance.
The music poured on. Crystal. Exalted. Pure. And fiery.
But the eyes in the white jade face were waking, were getting to be seeing eyes. The pale mouth trembled. Light trembled at its sharp uptilted corners....
Hugh was frightened. “You mustn’t. Oh, Ariel!” his heart cried, loud enough for hers to hear, he should think, “Don’t let it through into your face.Don’t let them see your soul!”
Two children’s heads, one topping the other, peering from a fold in the hall portières, were what had brought the expression into the dancer’s face. Persis and Nicky were being naughty. Escaped from Alice’s care—or perhaps Alice was there too in another fold of the silk hangings—in their nightgowns, just as they had left their beds, they were watching Ariel dance in their mother’s very drawing-room, as they had so often watched her dancing in Wild Acres woods.
Ariel did not look at the children again. She would not give them away. But that glimpse of them had changed everything. Persis and Nicky had counted on her finding the beginning of the magic path in the woods for them, the path which would lead to faërie. It was to begin with a clump of yellow and white violets. A hidden way. A secret way. The secret of the yellow and the pearly little flower faces. But she had not found it yet. Might she find it now? Bless them! She would try.
She knelt in the center of the gray rug, and looked for a clump of white and yellow violets. She pushed the damp, dead leaves of last summer’s woods away with firm but not repudiating fingers. And there, behind the sheen of the flower-faces she had uncovered, she did discover the secret, hidden way to faërie.
Rising, she turned to take the children’s hands. The path was here, and they would walk it now together. The three walked out the path through light and shade, their faces set toward faërie.
The watchers of the dance saw children with Ariel then, as clearly as if they were really there. And if they did not know exactly that they were on their way to faërie along with Ariel, they sensed something very like it.
Ariel and her invisible dance-children came to a sunny clearing. There, in a circle of happiness, they began walking slowly round and round in faërie. Until they stopped—to wait and listen in faërie. Then, and then only Ariel bent her head to look into the faces of her dance children.
But it was not Persis and Nicky’s faces that gave her back her look. Here were two dark, thinner faces. Greek in their perfection of feature. High-held, narrow heads, they had. And the dark, soft eyes of their dream-lighted faces were Hugh’s eyes over again....Hugh’s eyes, in children’s faces!
The dance went to shatters. Electric light tore away the sunlight from the clearing. And as though the music had been rays from the dance, it faded, thinned away.... A drawing-room remained, and a group of moved and almost unstrung people.
Ariel, standing still, startled by her vision of the dark, aquiline little faces of those terribly beloved dream children, looked about almost wildly for Hugh. And she found him leaning against the jamb of one of the long windows. He was looking at her, waiting for her eyes.
Ariel knew that the others were there somewhere, as well,—even that Michael was coming toward her from the piano. She knew where she was. She knew who she was. But in that instant, even with the dance shattered for her, she was too much at one with her soul to keep her secret longer. And Hugh’s face, for any one who could bear to look on such heart’s nakedness, told as much as hers. There flashed between them, across half the length of a room, terrible and startling as lightning, the mutual promise of love’s consummation.
Then Ariel blushed. Red swept from the tip of her chin up over her face. She was no longer a fairy-tale girl. Her cheeks seemed rounder, her smile for Anne who had rushed upon her with shrieks of praise, was not light-tipped and eerie. It was warm, merry. Not until Michael Schwankovsky fell to kissing her forehead and her hands with rapturous joy over her performance did the blush fade.
Every one was exclaiming the same thing. “Genius! Isadora was never so wonderful! Ariel Clare, why didn’t you do it for us before!” Every one except Hugh. He had got himself out of the room into the summer night, and, invisible himself, stood looking through the open window at Ariel, the center of the charmed, noisy little crowd.
“I’ve been wrong,” Joan was using the occasion to try on generosity, as an ordinary mortal might try on a new hat. “You know, my dear, I have been guilty of murmuring that you were just a normal, nice girl for whom we must find a husband. Your career should be motherhood. And all that. All the time Persis and Nicky could have told me better. But I thought your dancing with them was only a game. Now, my dear, I’d pay you dollars a minute if you’d teach my babies how to walk, kneel, move, dance. You did intend us to see children there at the end, didn’t you? Michael! Isn’t she too wonderful!”
“Come along, Ariel. You can put on your stockings and slippers in private.” Arm through her friend’s arm, Anne was pulling Ariel toward the open window. They did not see Hugh there as they came out, although Ariel’s wood-smoke frock actually brushed his knees in her passing. They sat down at the top of the steps going down from the terrace, while Ariel put on her stockings and slippers.
“Oh, Ariel! You’re lucky! Lucky! You’ll be a great dancer. You’ll have a career. So it really won’t matter to you whether your heart breaks or not. A person with genius like yours is safe, forever and forever. If I only had some gift, some art! I’d never be afraid again. I know I wouldn’t!”
“Anne!” Ariel sounded amazed at Anne’s lack of understanding. “I haven’t any art. And I’m not going to be a dancer. Ever! In there, nobody knows anything about me. But I thought you knew. As long as I live, I shall never dance when grown people are around again. Never—Never.... I shouldn’t have done it....”
The slippers were on. Ariel stood up. “I’m going home now. Do you think Glenn would drive me, and then come back?” she asked.
“But why? It’s your party, in your honor, and it’s not ten o’clock yet! Joan will be furious.”
Ariel lifted her hand and pressed the cold aquamarine against her cheek. “I can’t stay away from Grandam any longer,” she exclaimed. “Not to-night. She may be needing me.”
“Well, of course Glenn will take you. Your excuse is pretty weak, though. Rose has often stayed with Grandam before and got along all right. You haven’t by any chance got a hunch, have you, that Grandam does literally need you? The air is positively electric to-night. I’ve a strong hunch myself that Joan and Hugh are at last going to get engaged. Glenn and I are in cahoots to keep old Schwankovsky and Mother and Charlie amused, and give Hugh his chance—”
Hugh was suddenly there with them, materialized from the shadows. “I’ll drive you home,” he said authoritatively.
Although the girls had not known that any one was near them on the terrace they did not start at the sudden apparition. “I heard you, Anne,” Hugh added. “Andyourhunch, at least, is wrong. Joan definitely ended things last Sunday at the Hunt-Smith’s. As it happens, we’re both very happy about it. Thank you all the same, and Glenn!”
Although he addressed Anne, he was looking at Ariel, and Anne, even by moonlight, caught the quality of that look. She drew in her breath sharply. So that was it. And she hadn’t dreamed. God help Glenn then, and on this day of all days!
“But of course you’re not going so early!” Joan, visibly non-plused, refused to see Ariel’s hand held out for good-by. “Why should you, so early?”
Ariel looked down at her aquamarine. “I’m afraid I have to, Mrs. Nevin. Grandam may need me.”
“But surely not. Did she ask you to break up the party so early?”
“No—But I must—So, good night. And thank you very much.”
“Oh, very well then. So sorry. Glenn, you’ll drive Ariel home and come back, won’t you?” Joan put it as a command.
But Michael Schwankovsky boomed, “I shall be very happy to take the rest of the Weymans home inmycar, if Glenndoesn’tget back. Youth, Joan, youth!—No! This is not our ‘good-by,’ my Ariel. I shall put you into the car carefully, right beside your young man. Not?”
Joan was trying to catch Hugh’s eyes, but he was looking at Ariel. “I’m taking Ariel home,” he said. “Sorry, Glenn.” But his voice was vibrant. His face, his voice—together with Ariel’s pale, victorious face—told a great deal. But Joan shrank back from understanding what was becoming plain to most of the others.
She urged sharply, “But you’ll come back. You’ll only be gone ten minutes or so. I want a long, quiet talk with you to-night, Hugh. Our last, perhaps, for months!” She was very white. But Hugh did not take his eyes from the top of Ariel’s head, which was all he could see, for her face was bent quite down and she was still looking at the aquamarine. He replied, and it sounded absent-minded and was certainly casual, “Let’s have that talk to-morrow morning, Joan. Your boat doesn’t sail till midnight. I’m counting on quite a wonderful walk and talk with you in the woods to-morrow.”
“Oh! Yes?” Joan knew now, but did not admit to herself, that she had lost. How could she acknowledge that she had anything to fear from this pale girl, who stared at her silly ring when she could look up and see Hugh Weyman’s very heart in his eyes bent on her? Had Hugh ever looked at herself like that? She could not believe he had. If he had, then she had been a fool—a fool! She felt her ego shrivel. It was like a spent dandelion flower, dried into fluffy seed, blowing to the four winds.
When Ariel, after long ages, to Joan’s aching sensibilities, lifted her gaze from the aquamarine, withdrew herself from those distant, eerie, Bermudian depths, Joan made no more of her even then; for the eyes she lifted were crystal,—blind with tears. What in heaven’s name was the girl crying about? Crying!
Hugh found Glenn beside him when he went to get his car. And suddenly, as they crossed the wide sweep of gravel toward the parked roadster, Hugh came to earth again, for a minute. His heart smote him. His love for Ariel had been gradually, all the spring, making him more sensitive to the world about him and other people. And now he sensed possible suffering. He turned on Glenn and gripped his shoulders in the summer dark. “Glenn, old fellow! Are you in love with Ariel?” he asked.
There was only the hint of a hesitation before Glenn said carefully, as if he wanted Hugh to hear every word and remember it forever, “Does one fall in love with a poem? A star? Dawn? Ariel to me is all imagination. She’s in my soul, somehow. But not as woman.... I saw her look at you, Hugh.... At the end of the dance, you know. So I know that you two—that you two—Well! That’s only the shadow of Ariel you’ve got. An accident. Her earth side. The impersonal and beautiful is left for me. I’m not jealous. I’m not—suffering....”
“God bless you! Yes. It’s the woman I want, and that I’ve got. The wife. The mother....”
They went on to the car. Joan was waiting on the lowest stair under the portico, when they drove it around to the door, and Ariel had not yet broken away from Michael Schwankovsky’s farewells on the top step. The big voice was booming, “And next winter we’ll make a dancer of you! Divine! Better than Isadora ever was!”
Ariel laughed. “No, Michael. No, no. I shall never be a dancer. I may dance for you, if you will play again. Because you are not grown up and don’t embarrass me. I don’t mind you any more than I mind Persis and Nicky. You’ll dance with me. But you can’t ever make me into a dancer. Dear Michael!”
“We shall see about that. We shall see. When I come back I shall take care of you. I shall teach you to be ambitious. For the sake of art, I must do that, my child. Art cannot let you off, let you go. Not with such genius! I am no artist myself, you see, but I am militant for it wherever there is cause. It is religion with me. So, as I discover your father’s pictures, so I discover you. Not?”
Joan drew Hugh into the shadow of a pillar. “Michael’s raving again,” she whispered intimately, her breath at Hugh’s cheek, her perfumed scarf falling against the back of his hand, soft, mothlike. “It’s fatherly raving.We needn’t worry!”
With the intimately whispered “We needn’t worry,” Joan was trying desperately to identify her interest in Ariel with Hugh’s interest. She was determined to marry Hugh now, not merely resigned to it. And her cue, she thought, was partnership in his responsibility for Ariel. She would pretend genuine concern for the girl, even fondness, if she must. She was ready to do, to be anything—if only in return the scattered seeds of her vanity and pride could be blown back again into their brilliant flower pattern.
But Hugh scarcely heard her. He was listening to Ariel’s laughter and to Schwankovsky’s exuberant flattery and affection up by the door. And then—oh heavenly!—to Ariel’s voice, pebble-cool:
“No, never on the stage! But always for you, when you want. When you come to visit us—me.” But she had meant “us,” and Hugh knew that “us” meantthem, himself and Ariel.
“... To-morrow then? A walk in the woods? I’ll have something quite wonderful to tell you, Joan dear.” He had not understood her whispered surrender. And he was not aware that she had taken the end of her scarf from his fingers and was wrapping her bare shoulders now as if she were cold.
She tried only once more. “Hugh! Suppose I don’t go to-morrow! I’m quite out of the mood to-night. Why should I go? With Holly never so beautiful, and all my friends, mydearestfriends, here?”
His answer to that astounded her, in spite of all that had happened to her ego this night, by its simple cruelty. “I know it! Why should you go? It’s heaven on earth right here. Why should any one leave it? This night is—I never knew a night like this! It is wild—it iswild, Joan dear, with beauty and wonderfulness! I wouldn’t go to heaven to-morrow if all the angels invited me.”
She stood away from him. “Hugh! Are you aware of me at all?” she cried, but under her breath. “Do you realize that I said I might give up Switzerland?And why I should want to give it up?”
“Holly, you said, is so beautiful.... But Joan....” He was appalled. But then, before he allowed himself quite to understand her—and he had very nearly allowed that misfortune to them both to happen—he said quickly, “You mustn’t think of me, my dear. Or pity me. Ever! You were awfully right in all you said at Fernly. Remember? And our friendship, yours and mine,isgoing to be deeper and sounder than ever. It is enriched.” And then, forgetting her again, he exclaimed, “Everything’s enriched. Even the moonlight. It’s magic, isn’t it, Joan? Wild with loveliness!”
Before he got finally off with his Ariel, Hugh remembered that Glenn had lost his latchkey lately and not replaced it yet. So he’d better find him—he seemed to have vanished into the house—and give him his. He did not interrupt Ariel and Schwankovsky in their protracted farewells up at the door, but went around by the terrace to enter by the drawing-room windows.
Frye was at the piano now, in Schwankovsky’s place, his head bowed over the keys, his eyes shut, playing a blues. Anne and Glenn were dancing to it. But Hugh did not go in. He stood, struck into wonder by a wholly new aspect he was suddenly vouchsafed of his brother and sister. They were not his little brother—his little sister. No. The weird, heart-rending “blues” had turned them into a type—into its own note, its wail. They were figurines—pale—beautiful with grief.... Aristocratic, narrow heads held high.... Their chiseled faces Benda masks. Every motion of foot and leg and the wandlike bodies was heart-rending with passion and grief’s restraint....
Perhaps love had turned Hugh clairvoyant. Perhaps acute happiness does that sometimes. But whatever the cause of the illumination of his sympathy, he realized Glenn and Anne as noble, beautiful. And for one flashing instant he saw, typified in them, the pain of Youth itself.
He did no more about the key, but turned back to the car, awed and quieted. He did not understand precisely what had happened to him by this quickening in his soul of the power of insight. And above all he was not conscious of any concrete reason there might be in those two particular lives for his compassion. All that he knew definitely was that he had looked with naked eyes on the fortitude of youth.... He himself had never been so clear-cut as were Anne and Glenn. He had hoped and pretended his youth away. Glenn and Anne would go on dancing through their youth, dancing over its pains and anguishes, wand-held, reserved, with intricate steps.... Their eyes open.... Perfectly self-conscious.... But dancing still—with all the discipline of a patterned art.
The minute he was in the car beside Ariel he forgot them. The big house and all it held was blotted out in shadow at their backs, and their path cut itself ahead through moonlight. But neither spoke. Ariel sat well over at her own side of the wide seat. Hugh watched the road and guided the wheel. As they neared their avenue it never entered Hugh’s head to suggest, “Let’s go on, up the river.” Although the road was a wide path of sheer moonlight, and the silvered river raced at their shoulders like an Angel of Lovers. For he knew that Ariel’s heart held one intention—to get to Grandam. From the minute when, at dinner, Schwankovsky had drawn attention to her ring (except for the swift bright period of the dance), this had been true. So he raced the roadster in under the dark arch and up the moon-laced wood road through the glimmering birches and beeches, around the silvery-dark curves to the door. There he spoke the first words that had been uttered since they were alone together:
“I won’t drive the car around yet, but go up to see Grandam with you, Ariel.”
As they ascended the steps,—the three, shallow, wide steps to Wild Acres’ home-promising door,—Hugh was shy of Ariel. He longed that she should turn her face, look at him, speak to him. But Ariel was afraid of Hugh. She had said too much. She had said everything there ever would be to say, with her eyes, when she looked up from those heads of the dark dream-children, and found his dark eyes—so like, so terribly like—on hers.
Besides, here was the aquamarine on her finger, clear in the moonlight. And before she gave herself to Hugh, Grandam, her beloved friend, was to die. Things must come in their order. If she raised a hand, if she breathed too deeply, something might be shaken out of God’s beautiful intended order for it. All life—and birth and death—was so delicately balanced, it seemed, here, in one girl’s heart!
Hugh had his latchkey in the lock. But the door was not opening. Surprised at that, Ariel did turn and look up at him.
She stepped back—suddenly—away from what she saw. But he followed and took her into his arms. She leaned back against his arms, held herself back and away from his body, but her face remained lifted to his. By moonlight he saw that it was as expressionless as when she had danced, expressionless as the face of a flower is expressionless—to mortal eyes—and strangely silver, bent back this way against his dark coat sleeve. But although she was leaning back and away from him, he felt no weight on his arm. Her body was held with the dancer’s self-sustaining poise. Then he knew what he had only believed before: she was the eternal dancer, but not to music. Hers was the dance to life. His beloved’s whole genius was for living.
Gently, he drew the poised, free body toward him. There was no blindness of engulfing passion here, only two wills, free as day, rushing fleetly upon one another. No red flames roared against a dark mind-misery. Only sunrise breaking about the whole circle of his soul’s horizon. Heaven’s dawn.
Grandam saw their faces and bodies radiant with that dawn when they came into her room.
“So it is here in time for me to see, and to be happy with you! But just in time!” she told them with a quick breath.
Rose, who had stayed with Grandam until Ariel’s return, had left; and now that she was gone, Ariel ran forward and dropped on her knees by the low bed, and kissed Grandam on the lips. Sunrises, kisses. Hugh sat on the other side of the bed, and to-night Grandam did not make him get up and bring a chair. Instead she gave him one of her hands to hold. “How did you know, Grandam?” he asked. “I never told you we were in love. Did Ariel?”
“Neither of you told me. And I only hoped. I thank God you’ve got home in time to make me sure. Ariel! If your messenger should be off to-night, what message shall she take your father? Make it exact, and I’ll impress it on my memory. If only one could take a letter!”
Ariel was swept by terror. Her blood ran icy again, as at dinner. She tore her eyes from Hugh’s startled, puzzled face. Oh, the aquamarine had told her right. Her darling’s agony and death was coming swiftly—swiftly—Tears rose in an agony of their own in her throat and scalded her cheeks. Her sight fought through them for a view of the beloved face. Already Death was slipping over it the mask for agony. But no. The mask was carelessly put on—anyhow—askew. Ariel saw this.... And then, as if her tears were a clarifying medium—as in this case they were—she saw that under the badly adjusted mask-for-agony Grandam was smiling.
It was a new sort of smile altogether. It seemed to express anticipation, a kind of joyous excitement.... Youth.... Love.... An almostshylove.
But the smile was not for Ariel, nor for Hugh. For some one else entirely.... Some one whose hands Grandam guessed were about to open the door of her coach and let her out into Eternity? Or for some one else at the Saint’s shoulder? Only Death knows.
Through salty lips Ariel was sobbing—“Tell Father that I love him with my whole heart and that I am happy, happy—”
Hugh knelt. There was no time to get help or to do anything themselves. He held Grandam up, supported her agony.
“Darling!” he whispered. “Tell Gregory Clare that I will take care of his girl as long as we both shall live. Tell him that I love Ariel. No! Tell himhowI love Ariel.”
And they knew—just—that Grandam caught their messages.
THE END