Then he took her in his arms and kissed her lips as he had desired in his dream....

When they returned to the inn Belinda Seyffert offered flat explanations of why she had not followed them, and enlarged upon the moonlight effect of the Abbey ruins from the inn lawn.  But the scared congratulations in her eyes betrayed her recognition that momentous things had happened between the two.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

FULL MOON

Section 1

Sir Richmond had talked in the moonlight and shadows of having found such happiness as he could not have imagined.  But when he awoke in the night that happiness had evaporated.  He awoke suddenly out of this love dream that had lasted now for nearly four days and he awoke in a mood of astonishment and dismay.

He had thought that when he parted from Dr. Martineau he had parted also from that process of self-exploration that they had started together, but now he awakened to find it established and in full activity in his mind.  Something or someone, a sort of etherealized Martineau-Hardy, an abstracted intellectual conscience, was demanding what he thought he was doing with Miss Grammont and whither he thought he was taking her, how he proposed to reconcile the close relationship with her that he was now embarked upon with, in the first place, his work upon and engagements with the Fuel Commission, and, in the second place, Martin Leeds.  Curiously enough Lady Hardy didn’t come into the case at all.  He had done his utmost to keep Martin Leeds out of his head throughout the development of this affair.  Now in an unruly and determined way that was extremely characteristic of her she seemed resolute to break in.

She appeared as an advocate, without affection for her client but without any hostility, of the claims of Miss Grammont to be let alone.  The elaborate pretence that Sir Richmond had maintained to himself that he had not made love to Miss Grammont, that their mutual attraction had been irresistible and had achieved its end in spite of their resolute and complete detachment, collapsed and vanished from his mind.  He admitted to himself that driven by a kind of instinctive necessity he had led their conversation step by step to a realization and declaration of love, and that it did not exonerate him in the least that Miss Grammont had been quite ready and willing to help him and meet him half way.  She wanted love as a woman does, more than a man does, and he had steadily presented himself as a man free to love, able to love and loving.

“She wanted a man to love, she wanted perfected fellowship, and you have made her that tremendous promise.  That was implicit in your embrace.  And how can you keep that promise?”

It was as if Martin spoke; it was her voice; it was the very quality of her thought.

“You belong to this work of yours, which must needs be interrupted or abandoned if you take her.  Whatever is not mortgaged to your work is mortgaged to me.  For the strange thing in all this is that you and I love one another—­and have no power to do otherwise.  In spite of all this.