The longing to help her grief and to speak his own new knowledge was like a cry in him, but he did not speak as they walked upward through the solemn aisles. He felt as if he and Felicia, she with her sorrow, he with his wonderful knowledge, were walking in some sublime cathedral where in their mutual ignorance they were yet secretly near each other. In his hard, strong heart was a trembling sense of consecration.
Suddenly, from the dimness, they were out upon the open hill-top. Pale sunshine, an azure sky, swept them around. They were high above all the surrounding country. Beneath them were the blue-black pine-woods, slopes of pale dun and green, the shadow and sunlight of hill and valley, and all the delicate tracery of tree and earth still unveiled. Among the vague purples of the lower woods the roads ran like white ribbons. Here on the hill-top the wind blew steadily, sadly, in spite of all the gold and azure. Felicia's long black scarf fluttered against it, and she put her hand to her hat, standing looking away to the horizon, a slender silhouette of black, almost forgetting her companion, conscious only of her aching bereavement. She turned at last to Geoffrey, and found from the almost dreamy intentness of his gaze that he had been as absorbed in her as she in her own sad consciousness.
"I have been rather fagged this winter; sad; some branches have been lopped off; do you remember?" She did not want to talk with any nearness of her sadness; to speak of it, except at arm's length, would bring her to the verge of tears. She owned to it frankly, yet with a lightness that went like a bird, luring him from the nest where sadness was hidden; but, unfalteringly, with no reticence now, he went toward it.
"Do you know that I care, deeply, that you should be sad?"
"I know how kind you are," she said, feeling herself at a loss before the difference in voice and look. "So much kinder," she urged herself on to say, grasping at her old rallying attitude, "than I had ever suspected you of being. Do you know, I didn't imagine when I first met you that you were very kind. But don't bother about my sadness. It's of no importance."
Under his eyes her lightness was lamentably out of tune. She paused with the sense of graceless discord.
