Dangerous Days Part 88

And Clay responded, with equal gravity: "Yes, isn't it!"

Then he took off his overcoat and put it down, and placed his hat on the table, and said, very simply: "I couldn't stay away. I tried to."

"You hadn't a chance in the world, Clay, when I was willing you to come."

Then there was one of those silences which come when words have shown their absolute absurdity. It seemed a long time before he broke it.

"I'm not young, Audrey. And I have failed once."

"It takes two to make a failure," she said dauntlessly. "I--wouldn't let you fail again, Clay. Not if you love me."

"If I love you!" Then he was, somehow, in that grotesque position that is only absurd to the on-looker, on his knees beside her. His terrible self-consciousness was gone. He only knew that, somehow, some way, he must prove to her his humility, his love, his terrible fear of losing her again, his hope that together they might make up for the wasted years of their lives. "I wors.h.i.+p you," he said.

The little room was a sanctuary. The war lay behind them. Wasted and troubled years lay behind them. Youth, first youth, was gone, with its illusions and its dreams. But before them lay the years of fulfilment, years of understanding. Youth demanded everything, and was discontented that it secured less than its demands. Now they asked but three things, work, and peace, and love. And the greatest of these was love.

Something like that he said to her, when the first inarticulateness had pa.s.sed, and when, as is the way of a man with the woman who loves him, he tried to lay his soul as well as his heart at her feet. The knowledge that the years brought. That love in youth was a plant of easy growth, springing up in many soils. But that the love of the middle span of a man's life, whether that love be the early love purified by fire, or a new love, sowed in sacrifice and watered with tears, the love that was to carry a man and a woman through to the end, the last love, was G.o.d's infinitely precious gift. A gift to take the place of the things that had gone with youth, of high adventure and the lilt of the singing heart.

The last gift.