Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/368

 "I'm Man Saturday. And I can fast."

"Six eggs, six raspberry tarts, some Stilton. And I can raise a bottle of Pommard."

"Your rations for the week-end. But six eggs for supper! Is that necessary? We must leave something for your breakfast."

He looked at the hand. It was lying palm upwards now, and hollowed like a cup, and he felt an impulse upon him urging him to stoop and press his lips into the hollow of that hand. He resisted the impulse, and sat rigid, and tried to think of the rain, and the ten o'clock train at Marley station.

She turned her head on the cushion.

"It is not going to stop."

"No; it does not look like clearing."

"How final," she said, and stirred gently, and looked at nothing through half-closed eyelids.

Final! The word seemed to echo in him; it was like the crying of some bird in the grey of the dawn.

"O, nothing's final, unless"

He lost himself for a moment in looking down at her dim face.

"Not even the weather? Our temperamental weather! It seems to have made up its mind"

She held up a hand, not the hand on the sofa.

"Listen. On the water, on the leaves, on the grass. Drip, drip. And we two—on an island—with the grey green twilight"

"It's—it's beautiful," he said with a voice of a passionate awe.

He saw her eyes looking up, and suddenly he seemed to fall forward, and his mouth was pressed into the hollow of her hand. He trembled. Something touched his hair; he felt the pressure of her hand upon his head.

At six o'clock in the morning Kit bathed. The sky had cleared, but a mistiness lay upon the water and the fields, and a hugely yellow sun shot arrows of gold at him as he swam up the stream. That cold plunge and the glow that