“You’re the best—­the kindest—­” An urgent desire moved her to stop him before he put into words the feeling she could see in his face.  Though she knew that it was but the ghost of a feeling, the habit of a desire, which had become interwoven with his orderly and unchangeable custom of life, she realized nevertheless that its imaginary vividness might cause him great suffering.  A vision of what might have been eighteen years ago—­of their possible marriage—­rose before her while she struggled for words.  How could her energetic nature have borne with his philosophy of hesitation, her imperative affirmation of life with his denial of effort, her unconquered optimism with his deeply rooted mistrust of happiness?

There was beauty in his face, in his ascetic and over-refined features, in his sympathetic smile and his cultured voice; but it was the beauty of resignation, of defeat nobly borne, of a spirit confirmed in the bitter sweetness of renouncement.  “It would make an old woman of me to marry him,” she thought, “an old, patient, resigned woman.”

“Most things have slipped by me,” he resumed presently, while they raced down a long hill toward the black pines and the fading red of the afterglow.  In a marshy pond near the roadside frogs were croaking, while from the darkening fields, encircled with webs of mist, there floated the mingled scents of freshly mown grass, of dewy flowers, of trodden weeds, of ploughed earth, of ancient mould—­all the fugitive and immemorially suggestive odours of the country at twilight.  And at the touch of these scents, some unforgotten longing seemed to stir in her brain as if it had slept there, covered by clustering memories, from another lifetime.  She wanted something with an unbearable intensity; the vague and elusive yearning for happiness had become suddenly poignant and definite.  In that instant she knew unerringly that she was in love not with a dream, but with a fact, that she was in love not with Arthur, but with O’Hara.  For days, weeks, months, she had been blindly groping toward the knowledge; and now, in a flash of intuition, it had come to her like one of those discoveries of science, which baffle investigators for years, and then miraculously reveal themselves in a moment of insight.  Her first antagonism, her injustice, her unreasonable resentments and suspicions, she recognized now, in the piercing light of this discovery, as the inexplicable disguises of love.  And she was not old—­she was not even middle-aged—­she was as young as Fanny, as young as the eternal, ageless spirit of romance, of adventure.  This was life in her pulses, in her brain, in her heart—­life, not pale, not bitter sweet, but sparkling, glowing, bubbling like wine.

At the foot of the long hill Arthur turned the car, and they flew back between the dim fields where the croaking of frogs sounded louder in the darkness.  Ahead of them the lights of the car flitted like golden moths over the dust of the road, and in the sky, beyond the thin veil of mist, the stars were shining over the city.  Spring, which possessed the earth, bloomed in Gabriella’s heart with a wonderful colour, a wonderful fragrance.  She was young again with the imperishable youth of magic, of enchantment.  To love, to hope, to strive, this was both romance and adventure.