even
further than his own; they were conscious of the same necessity at the
same moment, only it was she, as a general thing, who most clearly saw
her way to it. Something in her long look at him now out of the old
grey window, something in the very poise of her hat, the colour of her
necktie, the prolonged stillness of her smile, touched into sudden light
for him all the wealth of the fact that he could count on her. He had
his hand there, to pluck it, on the open bloom of the day; but what
did the bright minute mean but that her answering hand was already
intelligently out? So, therefore, while the minute lasted, it passed
between them that their cup was full; which cup their very eyes, holding
it fast, carried and steadied and began, as they tasted it, to praise.
He broke, however, after a moment, the silence.

"It only wants a moon, a mandolin, and a little danger, to be a
serenade."

"Ah, then," she lightly called down, "let it at least have THIS!" With
which she detached a rich white rosebud from its company with another
in the front of her dress and flung it down to him. He caught it in
its fall, fixing her again after she had watched him place it in his
buttonhole. "Come down quickly!" he said in an Italian not loud but
deep.

"Vengo, vengo!" she as clearly, but more lightly, tossed out; and she
had left him the next minute to wait for her.

He came along the terrace again, with pauses during which his eyes
rested, as they had already often done, on the brave darker wash of
far-away watercolour that represented the most distant of the cathedral
towns. This place, with its great church and its high accessibility,
its towers that distinguishably signalled, its English history, its
appealing type, its acknowledged interest, this place had sounded its
name to him half the night through, and its name had become but another
name, the pronounceable and convenient one, for that supreme sense of
things which now throbbed within him. He had kept saying to himself
"Gloucester, Gloucester, Gloucester," quite as if the sharpest meaning
of all the years just passed were intensely expressed in it. That
meaning was really that his situation remained quite sublimely
consistent with itself, and that they absolutely, he and Charlotte,
stood there together in the very lustre of this truth. Every present
circumstance helped to proclaim it; it was blown into their faces as by
the lips of the morning. He knew why, from the first