THEY walked back together. Vane felt a year removed from the happenings of the last week, from Miss Morse, from all the others. It seemed as if the painted hotel were to vanish, like a stage-setting, and he were back in Carcassonne or Monserrat, back with her. All the genuine life that he had missed so long was his: the earnestness, the simplicity of olden times. Now no longer he asked himself what there was in America for him to do.
In all this there was nothing sentimental; it was natural, real, radical. That he ever could have doubted that he was in love!
What he felt for Winifred was passion, not sentiment, and he gloried in it; it was because she was a woman, after all, and he a man, and he knew now that he should win her.
There was a certain splendid excitement about Vane’s life that autumn. It was all so real to him now. The solution had come of itself. He was not yet her lover, formally accepted, but he felt that he was her lover in fact and truth. He was continually with her; following her to Newport when she went there for a month, late in October. She not only suffered him to be with her; she suffered him (as a woman may, impalpably) to love her; even, now and then, to show his love for her, as when he took her hand, or walked with her in autumn evenings by the sea. Now and then she would repulse him, telling him that he must not be confident of her; that it was only to be after many years; but her repulses grew fainter and less frequent. It did not, even then, seem to Vane as if he were teaching her to love; she was too sympathetic; she felt too quickly and too closely every impulse of his own; his passion was too readily reflected in the flush or paleness of her face. Rather was she herself the mistress, Vane the scholar. Nothing he said or sighed seemed to take her by surprise, to be unappreciated by her. He augured well from this.
When a woman admits that she may come to like a man in time, she means that she already loves him, but is not quite ready for marriage. It was a more dangerous footing, their intimacy on these terms, than if their troth had been fairly plighted. The man sought persistently to win new concessions, to force further confessions; the woman, having made the one admission, could but half resist. It brought about a new declaration of his passion every day; pale, she listened to the torrent of his words, now faintly chiding, now looking vacantly out to sea. The worn voices of the ocean gave might and earnestness to his pleading, and filled, with its own grave majesty, his broken pauses. Her hand would grow cold as it lay between his own, and she sat silent; until, with a start of self-reproach, she would regain her knowledge of the present and make him lead her back among the streets and houses.
Vane went occasionally, for a few days, to the city, to look after the affairs of his bank. The closing of his contract with Welsh, who finally paid to the firm nearly a million, and the reinvestment of this money, took much time. Vane had never been a better man of business than when he decided on these matters, thinking, with a thrill in his strong body, of the meeting, next day, and the long afternoon to be passed on the shore with the woman that he loved. Some days Vane would not go near her; he was still careful not to incur comment; he could control himself. But hardly any one was left in Newport now, and their walks far out upon the cliffs had generally escaped the notice of the world.