Page:Across the Stream.djvu/255

Rh certain exterior aids) the picture of the face and the form that he loved. But now he not only need not, but he must not, do that any longer: he had to cling to love. And while he waited for his father he kept recalling certain poignant moments in the growth of Helena's bewitchment of him. One was the night when they sat together for the last time in the dark garden at Silorno, and he wondered whether the suggestion of a cousinly kiss would disturb her. What had kept him back was the knowledge that it would not be quite a cousinly kiss on his part.… Then there was the moment when he had caught sight of her on the platform at Charing Cross: she had come to meet his train on his arrival from abroad.… Best of all, perhaps, for there his passion had most been fed with the fuel of her touch, had been the dance at his aunt's that same night, when the rhythm of the waltz and the melodious command of the music had welded their two young bodies into one. It was not "he and she" who had danced: it was just one perfect and complete individual. Here, on this quiet Sunday morning, the thought of that made him tingle and throb. It was that sort of memory which Martin told him he must keep alive.… It was his resentment, his anger, that must die, not that. Helena had chosen somebody else, but he must long for her still.

Lord Tintagel appeared, unusually white and shaky, and, as lunch-time was approaching, he rang for the apparatus of cocktails.

"I sat up late last night, Archie," he said, "bothering myself over those Russian shares. It's really of you and your mother I am thinking. It won't be long before all the mines in Russia will matter nothing to me, for a few feet of earth will be all I shall require. But, before I went to bed, I came to the conclusion that I was wrong to worry. I think the scare will soon pass, and the shares recover. Indeed, I think the wisest