All through the day Marjorie desired to go to Trafford and could not do
so. It was some minutes past nine when at last with a swift rustle of
skirts that sounded louder than all the world to her, she crossed the
dimly lit hall between dining-room and drawing-room and came into the
dreamland of moonlight upon the lawn. She had told her mother she was
going upstairs; at any moment she might be missed, but she would have
fled now to Trafford if an army pursued her. Her heart seemed beating in
her throat, and every fibre of her being was aquiver. She flitted past
the dining-room window like a ghost, she did not dare to glance aside at
the smokers within, and round the lawn to the shrubbery, and so under a
blackness of trees to the gate where he stood waiting. And there he was,
dim and mysterious and wonderful, holding the gate open for her, and she
was breathless, and speechless, and near sobbing. She stood before him
for a moment, her face moonlit and laced with the shadows of little
twigs, and then his arms came out to her.
"My darling," he said, "Oh, my darling!"
They had no doubt of one another or of anything in the world. They clung
together; their lips came together fresh and untainted as those first
lovers' in the garden.
"I will die for you," he said, "I will give all the world for you...."
They had thought all through the day of a hundred statements and
explanations they would make when this moment came, and never a word of
it all was uttered. All their anticipations of a highly strung eventful
conversation vanished, phrases of the most striking sort went like
phantom leaves before a gale. He held her and she clung to him between
laughing and sobbing, and both were swiftly and conclusively assured
their lives must never separate again.