At his touch she realized that, without being conscious of it, she had hoped that just this thing would happen.
All this happy afternoon, she had hoped for the warmth of his hands, the tenderness of his eyes, a word that would show he cared.
This was the first time they had been utterly alone since the cold day in the orchard at Tara, the first time their hands had met in any but formal gestures, and through the long months she had hungered for closer contact.
But now--
How odd that the touch of his hands did not excite her!
Once his very nearness would have set her a-tremble.
Now she felt a curious warm friendliness and content.
No fever leaped from his hands to hers and in his hands her heart hushed to happy quietness.
This puzzled her, made her a little disconcerted.
He was still her Ashley, still her bright, shining darling and she loved him better than life.
Then why--
But she pushed the thought from her mind.
It was enough that she was with him and he was holding her hands and smiling, completely friendly, without strain or fever.
It seemed miraculous that this could be when she thought of all the unsaid things that lay between them.
His eyes looked into hers, clear and shining, smiling in the old way she loved, smiling as though there had never been anything between them but happiness.
There was no barrier between his eyes and hers now, no baffling remoteness.
She laughed.
"Oh, Ashley, I'm getting old and decrepit."
"Ah, that's very apparent!
No, Scarlett, when you are sixty, you'll look the same to me.
I'll always remember you as you were that day of our last barbecue, sitting under an oak with a dozen boys around you.
I can even tell you just how you were dressed, in a white dress covered with tiny green flowers and a white lace shawl about your shoulders.
You had on little green slippers with black lacings and an enormous leghorn hat with long green streamers.
I know that dress by heart because when I was in prison and things got too bad, I'd take out my memories and thumb them over like pictures, recalling every little detail--" He stopped abruptly and the eager light faded from his face.
He dropped her hands gently and she sat waiting, waiting for his next words.
"We've come a long way, both of us, since that day, haven't we, Scarlett?
We've traveled roads we never expected to travel.
You've come swiftly, directly, and I, slowly and reluctantly."
He sat down on the table again and looked at her and a small smile crept back into his face.
But it was not the smile that had made her so happy so short a while before.
It was a bleak smile.
"Yes, you came swiftly, dragging me at your chariot wheels.
Scarlett, sometimes I have an impersonal curiosity as to what would have happened to me without you."
Scarlett went quickly to defend him from himself, more quickly because treacherously there rose to her mind Rhett's words on this same subject.
"But I've never done anything for you, Ashley.
Without me, you'd have been just the same.
Some day, you'd have been a rich man, a great man like you are going to be."
"No, Scarlett, the seeds of greatness were never in me.
I think that if it hadn't been for you, I'd have gone down into oblivion-- like poor Cathleen Calvert and so many other people who once had great names, old names."
"Oh, Ashley, don't talk like that.
You sound so sad."
"No, I'm not sad.
Not any longer.
Once--once I was sad.
Now, I'm only--"
He stopped and suddenly she knew what he was thinking.
It was the first time she had ever known what Ashley was thinking when his eyes went past her, crystal clear, absent.
When the fury of love had beaten in her heart, his mind had been closed to her.
Now, in the quiet friendliness that lay between them, she could walk a little way into his mind, understand a little.
He was not sad any longer.