Long silences came between their words,
which were no longer silences of struggle and confusion but refreshing
silences, in which trivial thoughts moved easily. They began to speak
naturally of ordinary things, of the flowers and the trees, how they
grew there so red, like garden flowers at home, and there bent and
crooked like the arm of a twisted old man.
Very gently and quietly, almost as if it were the blood singing in her
veins, or the water of the stream running over stones, Rachel became
conscious of a new feeling within her. She wondered for a moment what it
was, and then said to herself, with a little surprise at recognising in
her own person so famous a thing:
"This is happiness, I suppose." And aloud to Terence she spoke, "This is
happiness."
On the heels of her words he answered, "This is happiness," upon which
they guessed that the feeling had sprung in both of them the same time.
They began therefore to describe how this felt and that felt, how like
it was and yet how different; for they were very different.
Voices crying behind them never reached through the waters in which
they were now sunk. The repetition of Hewet's name in short, dissevered
syllables was to them the crack of a dry branch or the laughter of a
bird. The grasses and breezes sounding and murmuring all round them,
they never noticed that the swishing of the grasses grew louder and
louder, and did not cease with the lapse of the breeze.
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