thought they were going to
be all right themselves, in Kingdom Come. But suppose it doesn't come?"
Gyp murmured with a little smile:
"Perhaps they were trying to love everything at once."
"Rum way of showing it. And, hang it, there are such a lot of things one
can't love! Look at that!" He pointed upwards. Against the grey bole of
a beech-tree hung a board, on which were the freshly painted words:
PRIVATE
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
"That board is stuck up all over this life and the next. Well, WE won't
give them the chance to warn us off, Gyp."
Slipping her hand through his arm, she pressed close up to him.
"No, Dad; you and I will go off with the wind and the sun, and the trees
and the waters, like Procris in my picture."
VI
The curious and complicated nature of man in matters of the heart is not
sufficiently conceded by women, professors, clergymen, judges, and other
critics of his conduct. And naturally so, since they all have vested
interests in his simplicity. Even journalists are in the conspiracy to
make him out less wayward than he is, and dip their pens in epithets, if
his heart diverges inch or ell.
Bryan Summerhay was neither more curious nor more complicated than those
of his own sex who would condemn him for getting into the midnight
express from Edinburgh with two distinct emotions in his heart--a
regretful aching for the girl, his cousin, whom he was leaving behind,
and a rapturous anticipation of the woman whom he was going to rejoin.
How was it possible that he could feel both at once? "Against all the
rules," women and other moralists would say. Well, the fact is, a man's
heart knows no rules. And he found it perfectly easy, lying in his bunk,
to dwell on memories of Diana handing him tea, or glancing up at him,
while he turned the leaves of her songs, with that enticing mockery in
her eyes and about her lips; and yet the next moment to be swept from
head to heel by the longing to feel Gyp's arms around him, to hear her
voice, look in her eyes, and press his lips on hers. If, instead of
being on his way to rejoin a mistress, he had been going home to a wife,
he would not have felt a particle more of spiritual satisfaction, perhaps
not so much. He was returning to the feelings and companionship that he
knew were the most deeply satisfying spiritually and bodily he would ever
have. And yet he could ache a little for that red-haired
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