The Bigamist by Ethel Mills

Pamela awoke with the sun flashing in her eyes as the heavy lids lifted reluctantly to the flush of the new day. She sat up and looked from the window which had remained open and unshuttered through the night. Dare had left her shortly before two o'clock, and she had slept soundly until roused by the sun, which newly risen shone golden in a cloudless sky. Already its fiery heat penetrated into the carriage, and struck fiercely on her hands and face, and upon the cushions of the seat which felt warm under her touch.

She wondered whether Dare had slept, whether he slept still? Involuntarily her thoughts turned back to the overnight vigil. She reviewed with a regretful sense as of something past, gone irrevocably, the quiet hours of intimate companionship, silent hours for the greater part, -- silent with that eloquence of wordlessness more assertive than speech. A raised voice would have sounded intrusive, breaking the stillness of the darkened carriage where they had sat close together, gazing out upon the dusk, and whispering at intervals the thoughts which sprang straight from the heart to the lips. That night with its beauty; its stirrings of complex emotions, seeking and evading articulate expression; its untellable happiness, made up mainly of physical nearness and assimilated thoughts and feelings, had rolled back into the past, -- was curtained off for ever behind the obnubilating folds of yesterday's mantle. Only memory remained; the vivid hours had faded away in the dawn.