“I agree perfectly,” she said.
“And not a word to my mother, of course.”
“Of course not.”
The two were silent again.
And now reality—or rather, the faculties of memory and consideration by which reality is apprehended—were once more coming back to the girl and beginning to stir in her mind.
She began, gently now, and without perturbation, to recall what had passed, the long crescendo of the previous months, the gathering mutter of the spiritual storm that had burst last night—even the roar and flare of the storm itself, and the mad instinctive fight for the conscious life and identity of herself through which she had struggled.
And it seemed to her as if the storm, like others in the material plane, had washed things clean again, and discharged an oppression of which she had been but half conscious.
Neither was it herself alone who had emerged into this “clear shining after rain”; but the boy that stood by her seemed to her to share in her joy.
They stood here together now in a spiritual garden, of which this lovely morning was no more than a clumsy translation into another tongue.
There stirred an air about them which was as wine to the soul, a coolness and clearness that was beyond thought, in a radiance that shone through all that was bathed within it, as sunlight that filtered through water. She perceived then that the experience had been an initiation for them both, that here they stood, one by the other, each transparent to the other, or, at least, he transparent to her; and she wondered, not whether he would