Meanwhile the motor sped on, curving round the rocks.
"There is no more slate here, anyhow," cried Aura joyfully, tearing off her veil. "Oh Ned! look, look! The floor of heaven? Ah! do stop and let us look."
He did not answer. The engine slowed, quivered, sunk to silence. Now, at last, he understood. Now he knew what he had seen in the boat so long ago, when the swift southern storm was sweeping up unseen behind him. This was the blue mist which had enveloped him and held him. A blue mist hiding the earth, hiding even every green thing from sight as it lay in wreaths in the hollows or crept up and up and up, leaving itself in clouds to cover all things until it met the sky.
The floor of heaven indeed!
Not quite so blue perhaps as that distant roof of heaven over which the heat of the day had spread a faintly violet haze; but still--the floor of heaven!
No other words expressed it. Here, surely the angels of God might tread with unsoiled feet.
"Does not everything of earth seem to fall away," came Aura's voice all hushed and quiet, "and leave one ... free at last!"
She was out of the car standing, her sandalled feet just touching the carpet of hyacinths, her hands stretched out towards them, her face full of absolute undimmed joy. "See!" she continued, "the dear things grow on to our very path--we won't hurt them, will we? Let us walk on to the house and see Martha, then I will take you through a path in the woods to the best place of all." She paused and looked at him curiously. "Ned--what is it? Something is wrong! What is it?"
"There is nothing wrong," he answered quietly, "and I may as well tell you here as elsewhere. Martha is not at the house."
She paled a very little. "She is not there," she echoed; "why?"
"Because I sent her away."
"You sent her away?"
"Yes! because I wanted to be alone with you--and--we are alone--alone with nothing but our love between us--for you do love me? Aura!" he cried, his quiet giving way as he seized her hands and drew her towards him. "Why should we go back to all the grime--to the dull, useless, foolish life? Come with me! No one wants us, no one will miss us, not even Ted! It has all been a mistake from the beginning. There is but one way to set things straight--to leave him free to do as he chooses--come----"
"My poor Ned!"
She stood unresisting before him, with all the motherhood that was in her, looking at him through eyes that brimmed over with tears, and her voice, full of an overwhelming pity, smote on his ears, a knell to all his hopes. He knew it, he felt it to be so even as he listened. He let her hands fall with a sense of impotence to hold her.
"It is my fault, dear," she said softly, "I ought to have told you--I ought to have made you understand. Ned! I am worth no man's love. I shall never----"
He interrupted her with an angry impatient laugh. "But I do understand. It is you who cannot understand that love lives untrammelled by such trivialities. Aura! were I your husband now, you would be a thousand times more dear--the tie between us would be a thousand times more strong----"
"Hush!" she said, with a world of mysterious solemnity in her voice.
"If that is true, Ned; if love really can live untrammelled by the body, why should it not live untrammelled by the mind? You want to see me, to hear me, to--to touch me--perhaps! But Ned! There is something that is beyond all this--that is beyond everything--beyond you and me, and yet it is you and I--that is ours now----" Suddenly her tone rose swift and sharp--"Come, Ned! let us forget the rest----is _this_ not enough?"
He looked around him and, even amid such transcendental beauty as was there, shook his head. "I cannot live on air, Aura," he said bitterly.
"No man can."
Her face melted into gentle smiles. "There is the lunch-basket," she said.
He turned aside almost with a curse. "It is easy to laugh," he began.
"Is it so easy?" she asked, and once again her voice brought to him that sense of infinite pity, infinite denial. "Then let us laugh, Ned, while we can. Come, let us lose ourselves. Oh Ned! give me one day unspotted by the world, untouched by trivialities, just this one day!"
And as she took his hand, the glamour, not of this world, but of that which lies hidden beyond it, above it, claimed possession of his soul.
The blue mist closed in on them. They stood on the floor of heaven with the sky above them.
Down in the hollows with the silken fans of the half-opened beech-leaves overhead, a saffron-coloured azalea dropping its gold upon the blue, the pink campion struggling for a place amongst the blossoms, a tuft of white poet's-narcissus looking up from the pool of water into which a scarce-seen runlet dripped and dropped. What colour! What almost unimaginable beauty.
Out in the open, in a cup in the hills where the carpet of heaven-blue hyacinths dwarfed into closer growth showed like a shadowy cloud against the clearer blue of the sky. What dreamfulness! What peace!
Away on the springing heather on the mountain-top, with half Wales spread before you, and the westering sun obscured by just such a shadowy cloud, sending a great sloping corona of light rays to nestle in the dimples of the hills, and shine in shafted reflections on the distant sea.
What visions of unending space, of ceaseless life!
"Is it not time?" she said at last as they sat in the sheep-shelter.
The sun was beginning to sink in the west calmly, serenely. The light shone round them, purest gold. Down in the valley, the blue hyacinth mist grew darker, colder.
"Yes! It is time," he said quietly.
"It has been quite perfect," she said again.
"Almost perfect," he assented; after all he was but human, and humanity does not live by sight alone. It craves to touch also.
The motor was awaiting them where they had left it.
She laid her hand on his for a second ere he started it.
"Say it has been quite perfect, Ned," she pleaded.
He looked at her and smiled. "I will not say it--you can say it for me."
She was silent for a moment and then she spoke.
"It has been quite perfect!"
The motor sped on, the mist wreaths of the hyacinths grew dulled by young green sprouting ferns, and the rocks closed in for the swift turn by the school. The children were already out, and a group of them were playing on the road. They scattered, leaving it clear. And then, suddenly, from the shadow of the parapet-wall a little toddling child, escaping from the hand of its wide-eyed curiosity-struck elder, lurched out into the open.
"Oh Ned! Take care--the child--the child!"