"There's a place under beech trees--a sort of chalk plateau--I used to
have picnics there with my brothers when I was a little girl--"
"Shall we go there?" he asked. "Will you really take me to the place
that your pretty memories haunt? Ah--how good you are to me."
As they went down the steep wood-path she slipped, stumbled--he caught
her.
"Give me your hand!" he said. "This path's not safe for you."
It was not. She gave him her hand, and they went down into the wood
together.
The picnic was gay as an August garden. After a life of repression--to
meet someone to whom one might be oneself! It was very good.
She said so. That was when he did kiss her hand.
When lunch was over they sat on the sloped, short turf and watched the
rabbits in the warren below. They sat there and they talked. And to the
end of her days no one will know her soul as he knew it that day, and no
one ever knew better than she that aspect of his soul which he chose
that day to represent as its permanent form.
The hours went by, and when the shadows began to lengthen and the sun to
hide behind the wood they were sitting hand in hand. All the
entrenchments of her life's training, her barriers of maidenly reserve,
had been swept away by the torrent of his caprice, his indolently formed
determination to drink the delicate sweet cup of this day to the full.
It was in silence that they went back along the wood-path--her hand in
his, as before. Yet not as before, for now he held it pressed against
his heart.
"Oh, what a day--what a day of days!" he murmured. "Was there ever such
a day? Could there ever have been? Tell me--tell me! Could there?"
And she answered, turning aside a changed, softened, transfigured face.
"You know--you know!"
So they reached the stile at the top of the wood--and here, when he had
lent her his hand to climb it, he paused, still holding in his her hand.
Now or never, should the third volume begin--and end. Should he? Should
he not? Which would yield the more perfect memory--the one kiss to crown
the day, or the kiss renounced, the crown refused? Her eyes, beseeching,
deprecating, fearing, alluring, decided the question. He framed her soft
face in his hands and kissed her, full on the lips. Then not so much for
insurance against future entanglement as for the sound of the phrase,
which pleased him--he was easily pleased at the moment--he said--
"A kiss for love--for memory--for despair!"
It was almost in silence that they went through lanes still and dark,
across the widespread park lawns and down the narrow road to the
station. Her hand still lay against his heart. The kiss still thrilled
through them both. They parted at the station. He would not risk the
lessening of the day's charming impression by a railway journey. He
could go to town by a later train. He put her into a crowded carriage,
and murmured with the last hand pressure--
"Thank God for this one day. I shall never forget. You will never
forget. This day is all our lives--all that might have been."
"I shall never forget," she said.
* * * * *
In point of fact, she never has forgotten. She has remembered all, even
to the least light touch of his hand, the slightest change in his soft
kind voice. That is why she has refused to marry the excellent solicitor
who might have made her happy, and, faded and harassed, still teaches to
High School girls the Euclid and Algebra which they so deeply hate to
learn.
As for him, he went home in a beautiful dream, and in the morning he
wrote a song about her eyes which was so good that he sent it to the
_Athenaeum_, and got two guineas for it--so that his holiday was really
not altogether wasted.