"I wonder," she mused, "oh! how I wonder. Do you think it possible that we shall be living ten thousand years hence?"
"Quite," he answered with cheerful assurance, "much more possible than that I should be living to-day. What's ten thousand years? It's quite a hundred thousand since I saw you."
"Don't laugh at me," she exclaimed.
"Why not, dear, when there's nothing in the whole world at which I wouldn't laugh at just now? although I would rather look at you. Also I wasn't laughing, I was loving, and when one is loving very much, the truth comes out."
"Then you really think it true--about the ten thousand years, I mean?"
"Of course, dear," he answered, and this time his voice was serious enough. "Did we not tell each other yonder in the Abbey that ours was the love eternal?"
"Yes, but words cannot make eternity."
"No, but thoughts and the will behind them can, for we reap what we sow."
"Why do you say that?" she asked quickly.
"I can't tell you, except because I know that it is so. We come to strange conclusions out yonder, where only death seems to be true and all the rest a dream. What we call the real and the unreal get mixed."
A kind of wave of happiness passed through her, so obvious that it was visible to the watching Godfrey.
"If you believe it I dare say that it is so, for you always had what they call vision, had you not?" Then without waiting for an answer, she went on, "What nonsense we are talking. Don't you understand, Godfrey, that I am quite old?"
"Yes," he answered, "getting on; six months younger than I am, I think."
"Oh! it's different with a man. Another dozen years and I'm finished."
"Possibly, except for that eternity before you."
"Also," she continued, "I am even----"
"Even more beautiful than you were ten years ago, at any rate to me," he broke in.
"You foolish Godfrey," she murmured, and moved a little away from him.
Just then the door opened, and Mrs. Parsons, looking very odd in a nurse's dress with the cap awry upon her grey hair, entered, carrying a bit of paper.
"The hunt I had!" she began; "that silly, new-fangled kind of a girl-clerk having stuck the paper away under the letter O--for officers, you know, Miss--in some fancy box of hers, and then gone off to tea. Here are the names, but I can't see without my specs."
At this point something in the attitude of the two struck her, something that her instincts told her was uncommon, and she stood irresolute. Isobel stepped to her as though to take the list, and, bending down, whispered into her ear.