"I should say the wrong things. I should read other people's letters."
"I should hope so. It is the only way I shall ever hear from my relations."
"Adrian."
"Yes?"
"I have not told you the answer."
He went quite white. He gripped the door frame with his good hand. "No," he said hoarsely. "No. You have not. I am sorry. Pray go on."
She looked at him. The tall dark ruined man in the doorway, with the pale scar and the tired eyes, who had once been a boy at a window, who had held a gate against the French, who had written, in a hand that had had to learn itself again from nothing, four hours of honesty on a single sheet.
"Yes," said Clara.
He did not seem to hear.
"Yes. It is yes. It has been yes since you said that nobody had said your name in that voice for nineteen years." The tears had begun, running down her face, and she did not care. "It is yes, you foolish man, and you may stop looking as though you are about to be shot."
For a moment Adrian Ravensdale did not move at all. Then he crossed the study in three strides, and took her face in both his hands, the strong one and the scarred one, and bent his head, and kissed her.
It was not at all like the kisses in books. It was awkward and breathless and slightly too hard, and her bonnet strings were in the way, and somewhere in the course of it a stack of old bills went over with a soft slithering sound and drifted down about their feet like snow. She did not mind. She had her arms round his neck, and her fingers in his untidy hair, and the letter crushed between them, and she thought, with great clearness, that this was the only thing she had ever found among the others that had not been addressed to anyone but herself.
When at last he lifted his head, they were both laughing.
"You are not to tell my grandmother how long it took me," he said, unsteadily.
"I think she knows."