Page:Twilight.djvu/303

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
TWILIGHT
295

She had done much already. She rated highly her three or four novels, her two plays. Unhappiness had dulled her gift, but today she felt how wondrously it would be revived. There are epigrams among her MS. notes.

"All his life he had kept his emotions soldered up in tin boxes, now he was surprised that they were like little fish, compressed and without life." This was tried in half a dozen ways but never seemed to please her.

"Happiness, true happiness, holds the senses in solution, it requires matrimony to diffuse them."

It seemed extraordinary now that she should have found content in these futilities. But it was nevertheless true. She came down to Carbies on Wednesday and it was Friday before she even remembered Peter Kennedy's existence, and that it would be only polite to let him know she was here, greatly improved in health, on the eve of marriage. Friday morning she telephoned for him. When he came she was sitting at her writing-table, with that inner radiance about her of which he spoke so often, her soft lips in smiling curves, her eyes agleam.

Peter had known she was there, known it since the hour she came. He had bad news for her and would not hurry to tell her, not now, when she had sent for him. In the presence of that radiance he