Free The Passionate Year by James Hilton Page B

in their eyes had grown brighter, fiercer, more bursting from within.
But now, as they met and separated in the laughing crowd that squirmed its
way down the steps of the Big Hall, some subtle telepathy between their minds
told them that never again would they shrink from the vivid joy of
confession. To-night…thought Speed, as he went up to his room and slipped
off his cap and gown. And the same wild ecstasy of anticipation was in
Helen’s mind as she walked with Clare across the lawns to the Head’s
house.
V
    That night the moon was full and high; the leaden roofs and
cupola of the pavilion gleamed like silver plaques; and all the cricket-pitch
was covered with a thin, white, motionless tide into which the oblong shadows
pushed out like the black piers of a jetty. Millstead was silent and serene.
A third of its inhabitants had departed by the evening trains; perhaps
another third was with its parents in the lounges of the town hotels; the
remainder, reacting from the day’s excitement and sobered by the unaccustomed
sparseness of the population, was more silent than usual. Lights gleamed in
the dormitories and basement bathrooms, but there was an absence of stir,
rather than of sound, which gave to the whole place a curious aspect of
forlornness; no sudden boisterous shout sent its message spinning along the
corridor and out of some wide-open window into the night. It was a world of
dreams and spells, and to Speed, standing in the jet-black shadow of the
pavilion steps, it seemed that sight and sound were almost one; that he could
hear moonlight humming everywhere around him, and see the tremor in the sky
as the nine o’clock chiming fell from the chapel belfry.
    She came to him like a shy wraith, resolving out of the haze of moonbeams.
The bright gold of her hair, drenched now in silver, had turned to a glossy
blackness that had in it some subtle and unearthly colour that could be
touched rather than seen; Speed felt his fingers tingle as at a new
sensation. Something richly and manifestly different was abroad in the world,
something different from what had ever been there before; the grey shining
pools of her eyes were like pictures in a trance. He knew, strangely and
intimately, that he loved her and that she loved him, that there was
exquisite sweetness in everything that could happen to them, that all the
world was wonderfully in time and tune with their own blindfold yet
miraculously self-guiding inclinations. Tears, lovely in moonlight, shone in
her clear eyes, eyes that were deep and dark under the night sky; he put his
arm around her and touched his cheek with hers. It was as if his body began
to dissolve at that first ineffable thrill; he trembled vitally; then, after
a pause of magic, kissed her dark, wet, offering lips, not with passion, but
with all the wistful gentleness of the night itself, as if he were afraid
that she might fly away, moth-like, from a rough touch. The moonlight, sight
and sound fused into one, throbbed in his eyes-and ears; his heart, beating
quickly, hammered, it seemed, against the stars. It was the most exquisite
and tremulous revelation of heaven, heaven that knew neither bound nor
end.
    “Wonderful child!” he whispered.
    She replied, in a voice deep as the diapason note of an organ: “ Am I wonderful?”
    “ You are,” she said, after a pause.
    He nodded.
    “ I ?” He smiled, caressing her hair. “I feel—I feel, Helen, as
if nothing in the world had ever happened to me until this night! Nothing at
all!”
    “ I do,” she whispered.
    “As if—as if nothing in the world had ever happened to anybody until
now.”
    “You love me?”
    “Yes, Kenneth.”
    “I love you.”
    “I’m—I’m—I’m glad.”
    They stood together for a long while with the moonlight on their faces,
watching and thinking and dreaming and wondering. The ten o’clock chimes
littered the air with their mingled pathos and cheer; the hour had been