"We make her very welcome when she comes to ours." Imogen did not descend to self-exculpation. She spoke gently and gravely, casting only a glance at Sir Basil, as if calling him to witness her pained magnanimity.

"It would be fun, you know, to help her to start a new one," said Rose;—"something rebellious and anarchic. Will you help me if I do, Eddy? Come, let's sow discord in Imogen's Eden, like a couple of serpents."

Reptilian analogies seemed uppermost this morning; Imogen felt their fitness while, smiling on, she answered: "I don't think that mere rebellion—not only against Eden but against the Tree of Knowledge as well—would carry you far, Rose. Your membership would be of three—Mattie and the two serpents."

Sir Basil laughed out at the retort.

"You evidently don't know the club and all those delightful young women," he said to Rose.

"Oh, yes, indeed I do. Every one sees Imogen's clubs. I don't think them delightful. Women in crowds are always horrid. We are only tolerable in isolation."

"You hand over to us, then,"—it was Jack who spoke, and with his usual impatience when bending to Rose's folly,—"all the civic virtues, all the virtues of fraternity?"

"With pleasure; they are becoming to nobody, for that matter. But I'm quite sure that men are brothers. Women never are sisters, however, unless, sometimes, we are sisters to you," Rose added demurely, at which Sir Basil gave a loud laugh.

Imogen, though incensed, was willing that on this low ground of silly flippancy Rose should make her little triumphs. She kept her smile. "I don't think that those of us who are capable of another sisterhood will agree with you," and her smile turned on Mary another coal of fire, for she suspected Mary of apostasy. "I don't think that the women whose aim in life is—well—to make brothers of men in Rose's sense, can understand sisterhood at all, as, for instance, Mary and I do."

"Oh, you and Mary!"—Rose tapped her eggshell and salted her egg. "That's not sisterhood;—that's prophetess and proselyte. You're an anarchist to the bone, Imogen, like the rest of us;—you couldn't bear to share anything—It's like children playing games:—If I can't be the driver, I won't play horses."

"Oh, Rose!" came in distressed tones from Mary; but Imogen did not flinch from her serenity.

Outside on the veranda, where they all wandered after breakfast, her moment came at last. Jack had walked away with Mary; Miss Bocock, with a newspaper, stood in the shade at a little distance. Rose and Eddy were wandering among the flowers.

Imogen knew, as she found herself alone with Sir Basil, that the impulse that rose in her was the crude one of simply snatching. She controlled its demonstration so that only a certain breathlessness was in her voice, a certain brilliancy in her eye, as she said to him, rapidly:—

"He will never let you see me! Never!"

"He? Who?—What do you mean?" Sir Basil, startled, stared at her.

"Jack! Jack! Haven't you noticed?"

"Oh, I see. Yes, I see." His glance became illuminated. In a voice as low as her own he asked: "What does it mean?—I never can get a word with you. He's always there. He's very devoted to you, I know; but, I supposed that—well, that his chance was over."

His hesitation, the appeal of his glance, were lightning-flashes of assurance for Imogen, opening her path for her.

"It is over;—it is over;—but it's false that he is devoted to me," she whispered. "He hates me. He is my enemy."

"Oh, I say!" gasped Sir Basil.

"And since he failed to win me—Don't you see—It's through sheer spite—sheer hatred."

Her brilliant eyes were on him and a further "Oh!" came from Sir Basil as he received this long ray of illumination. And it was so dazzling, although Imogen, after her speech, had cast down her eyes, revealing nothing more, that he murmured hastily:—"Can't I see you, Imogen, alone;—can't you arrange it in some way?"

Imogen's eyes were still cast down, while, the purpose that was like a possession, once attained, her thoughts rushed in, accused, exculpated, a wild confusion that, in another moment had built for her self-respect the shelter of a theory that, really, quite solidly sustained the statement so astounding to herself when it had risen to her lips. Hatred, spite; yes, these were motives, too, in Jack's treachery; she hadn't spoken falsely, though it had been with the blindness of the overmastering purpose. And her dignity was untarnished in Sir Basil's eyes, for, she had seen it at last, her path was open; she had only to enter it.

Her heart seemed to flutter in her throat as she said on the lowest, most incisive note: "Yes,—I, too, want to see you, Sir Basil. I am so lonely;—you are the only one who cares, who understands, who is near me. There must be real truth between us. This morning—he has prevented that. But to-night, after we have all gone up-stairs, come out again, by the little door at the back, and meet me—meet me—" her voice wavered a little, "at the rustic bench, up in the woods, where we went last night. There we can talk." And catching suddenly at all the nobility, so threatened in her own eyes, remembering her love for him, her great love, and his need, his great need, of her, she smiled deeply, proudly at him and said:

"We will see each other, at last, and each other's truth, under God's stars."



XXVI

Jack had drawn Mary aside, around the sunny veranda, and, out of ear-shot of everybody, a curious intentness in his demeanor, he asked her to run up to Mrs. Upton's room and ask her if she wouldn't take a drive with him that morning. Since the Uptons' impoverishment their little stable was, perforce, empty; and it was Jack who ordered the buggy from the village and treated the company in turn to daily drives.

Mary departed on her errand, hearing Jack telephoning to the livery-stable as she went up-stairs.

She had to own to herself that the charm had grown on her, and the fact of her increasing fondness for Imogen's mother made the clearer to her all the new, vague pain in regard to Imogen. Imogen, to Mary's delicate perception of moral atmosphere, was different; she had felt it from the moment of her arrival. No one had as yet enlightened her as to the Potts's catastrophe, but even by its interpretation she would have found the change hard to understand. Perhaps it was merely that she, Mary, was selfish and felt herself to be of less importance to Imogen. Mary was always conscious of relief when she could fix responsibility upon herself, and she was adjusting all sorts of burdens on her conscience as she knocked at Mrs. Upton's door.

The post had just arrived, and Valerie, standing near her dressing-table, was reading her letters as Mary came in. Mary had never so helplessly felt the sense of charm as this morning.

She wore a long white dressing-gown, of frilled lawn, tied with black ribbons at throat and wrists. Her abundant chestnut hair, delicately veined with white, was braided into two broad plaits that hung below her waist, and her face, curiously childlike so seen, was framed in the banded masses. Mary could suddenly see what she had looked like as a little girl. So moved was she by the charm that, Puritan as she was, she found herself involuntarily saying:—"Oh, Mrs. Upton, what beautiful hair you have."

"It is nice, isn't it?" said Valerie, looking more than ever like a child, a pleased child; "I love my hair."

Mary had taken one braid and was crunching it softly, like spun silk, in her hand. She couldn't help laughing out at the happy acceptance of her admiring speech; the charm was about her; she understood; it wasn't vanity, but something flower-like.

"You have heaps, too," said Valerie.

"Oh, but it's sand-colored. And I do it so horribly. It is so heavy and pulls back so."

"I know; that's the difficulty with heaps of hair. But I had a very clever maid, and she taught me how to manage it. Sand-color is a lovely color as a background to the face, you know."

Valerie rarely made personal remarks and rarely paid compliments. She had none of the winning allurements of the siren; Mary had realized that and was now realizing that genuine interest, even if reticent, may be the most fragrant of compliments.

"I wish you would let me show you how to do it," Valerie added.

Mary blushed. There had always been to her, in her ruthless hair-dressing, an element of severe candor, the recognition of charmlessness, a sort of homage paid to wholesome if bitter fact. Mrs. Upton was not, in her flower-like satisfaction, one bit vain; but Mary suspected herself of feeling a real thrill of tempted vanity. The form of the temptation was, however, too sweet to be rejected, and Mrs. Upton's hair was so simply done, too, though, she suspected, done with a guileful simplicity. It wouldn't look vain to do it like that; but, on the other hand, it would probably take three times as long to do; there was always the question of one's right to employ precious moments in personal adornment. "How kind of you," she murmured. "I am so stupid though. Could I really learn? And wouldn't it take up a good deal of my time every morning?"

Valerie smiled. "Well, it's a nice way of spending one's time, don't you think?"

This was, somehow, quite unanswerable, and Mary had never thought of it in that light. She sat down before Valerie's pretty, tipped mirror and looked with some excitement at the rows of glittering toilet utensils set out before her. She was sure that Mrs. Upton found it nice to spend a great deal of time before her mirror.

"It is so kind of you," she repeated. "And it will be so interesting to see how you do it. And, oh, I am forgetting the thing I came for—how stupid, how wrong of me. It's a message from Jack. He wants to know if you will drive with him."

"And what are all the plans for to-day?" Mrs. Upton asked irrelevantly, unpinning the clustered knobs at the back of Mary's head and softly shaking out the stringently twisted locks as she uncoiled them.

"It is so kind of you;—but oughtn't I to take Jack his answer first?"

"The answer will wait. He has his letters to see to now. What are they all doing?"

"Well, let me see; Rose is in the hammock and Eddy is talking to her. Imogen is going to take Miss Bocock to see her club."

"Oh, it is Imogen's club day, is it? She asked Miss Bocock?"

"Miss Bocock asked her, or, rather, Jack told her that he had been telling Miss Bocock about it; it was Jack who asked. He knew, of course, that she would be interested in it;—a big, fine person like Miss Bocock would be bound to be."

"Um," Valerie seemed vaguely to consider as she passed the comb down the long tresses. "I don't think that I can let Imogen carry off Miss Bocock;—Miss Bocock can go to the club another day; I want to do some gardening with her this morning; she's a very clever gardener, did you know?—So I shall be selfish. Imogen can take Sir Basil; he likes walks."

Mrs. Upton was now brushing, and very dexterously; but Mary, glancing at her with a little anxiety for the avowed selfishness, fancied that she was not thinking much about the hair. Mary could not quite interpret the change she felt in the lovely face. Something hard, something controlled was there.

"But Jack?"—she questioned.

"Well, Jack can take you on the drive. You and he have seen very little of each other since you've come; such old friends as you are, too."

"Yes, we are," said Mary, gazing abstractedly at her own face, now, in the mirror, and forgetting both her own transformation and the face that bent above her. A familiar cloud of pain gathered within her and, suddenly, she found herself bursting out with:—"Oh, Mrs. Upton—I am so unhappy about Jack!"

Valerie, in the mirror, gave her a keen, quick glance. "I am, too, Mary," she said.

Mary, at this, turned in her chair to look up at her:—"You see, you feel it, too!"

"That he is unhappy? Yes, I see and feel it."

"And you care;—I am sure that you care."

"I care very much. I love Jack very much."

Mary seized her hand and tears filled her eyes. "Oh, you are a dear!—One must love him when one really knows him, mustn't one?—Mrs. Upton, I've known Jack all my life and he is simply one of the noblest, deepest, realest people in the whole world."

"I am sure of that."

"Well, then, can't you help him?" Mary cried.

"How can I help him?—In what way?" Valerie asked, her grave smile fading.

"With Imogen. It's that, you see, their alienation, that's breaking his heart.

"Of course you've seen it all more clearly than I have," Mary went on, her hair about her face, her hand clasping Valerie's;—"Of course you understand it, and everything that has happened to them. I love Imogen, too—please don't doubt that;—but, but, I can't but feel that it's her mistake, her blindness that has been the cause. She couldn't accept it, you see, that he should—stand for a new thing, and be loyal to the old thing at the same time."

Valerie, now, had sunken into a chair near Mary's, and one hand was still in Mary's hand, and in the other she still held a tress of Mary's hair. She looked down at this tress while she said:—"But Imogen was right, quite right. He couldn't stand for the new thing and be loyal to the old."

Mary's eyes widened: "You mean,—Mrs. Upton?—"

"Just what you do. That I am the cause."

She raised her eyes to Mary's and the girl became scarlet.

"Oh,—you do see it all," she breathed.

"All, all, Mary. To Imogen I stand, I must stand, for the wrong; to Jack—though he can't think of me very well as 'standing' for anything, I'm not altogether in that category. So that his championship of me judges him in Imogen's eyes. Imogen has had a great deal to bear. Have you heard of the last thing? She has not told you? I have refused my consent to her having a biography of her father written. She had set her heart on it."

"Oh, I hadn't heard anything. You wouldn't consent? Oh, poor Imogen!"

"It is, poor Imogen. In this, too, she has found no sympathy in Jack. All his sympathy is with me. It has been the end, for both of them. And it is inevitable, Mary."

"Oh, Mrs. Upton, what can I say—what can I think?—I don't seem to be able to see who is right and who is wrong!" Mary covered the confusion of her thoughts by burying her face in her hands.

"No; one can't see. That's what one finds out."

"Of course, I have always thought Mr. Upton a very wonderful person," Mary murmured from behind her hands, her Puritan instinct warning her that now, when it gave her such pain, was the time above all others for a "testifying," a "bearing witness."—"But I know that Jack never felt about that as I did. Of course I, too, think that the biography ought to be written."

Valerie was silent, and her silence, Mary felt, was definitive.

She wouldn't explain herself; she wouldn't seek self-exculpation; and while, with all her humility, Mary felt that as a little stinging, she felt it, also, as something of a relief. Mrs. Upton, no doubt, was indifferent as to her opinion of her rightness and her wrongness, and Mrs. Upton—there was the comfort of it,—was a person whom one must put on one side when it came to judgments. She didn't seem to belong to any of the usual categories. One didn't want to judge her. One was thankful for the haze she made about herself and her motives. That Jack understood her was, Mary felt sure, the result of some peculiar perspicacity of Jack's, for she didn't believe that Mrs. Upton had ever explained or exculpated herself to Jack, either. It even dawned on her that his perspicacity perhaps consisted mainly in the sense of trust that she herself was experiencing. She trusted Mrs. Upton, were she right, or were she wrong, and there was an end of it. With that final realization she uncovered her eyes and met her hostess's eyes again, eyes so soft, so clear, but with, in them, a look of suffering. Childlike, her hair folding behind her cheek and neck, she was faded, touched with age; Mary had never seen it so clearly. Somehow it made her even sorrier than the suffering she recognized.

"Oh, but it's been hard for you, too," she exclaimed, shyly but irrepressibly, "everything, all of it. Just let me say that."

Valerie had blushed her infrequent, vivid blush. She rose and came behind Mary's chair again, gathering up the abandoned tresses. But before she began to comb and coil she said, "Thanks," leaning forward and, very lightly, kissing the girl's forehead.

After that there was silence between them while the work of hair-dressing went on. Valerie did not speak again until, softly forming the contour of the transfigured head, she said, looking at Mary's reflection with an air of quiet triumph;—"Now, is not that charming?"

"Charming; perfectly charming," Mary replied, vaguely; the tears were near her eyes.

"You must come again, to-morrow, and do it under my supervision. It only needs this, now." She thrust two heavy tortoise-shell pins into the coils on either side of Mary's head.

"Those beautiful pins! I am afraid I shall lose them!"

"But they are yours,—mementoes of the new era in hair-dressing. I have several of them. There, you are quite as I would have you,—as far as your head goes."

"Not as far as the rest of me goes, I'm afraid," said Mary, laughing in spite of herself, and lured from sadness.

"I wish you'd let me make the rest of you to match," said Valerie. "I've always loved dressing people up. I loved dressing my dolls when I was a child. That stiff shirt doesn't go with your head."

"No, it doesn't. I really don't see," said Mary tentatively, "why one shouldn't regard dressing as a form of art; I mean, of course, as long as one keeps it in its proper place, as it were."

"To get it in its proper place is to dress well, don't you think. I found such a pretty lawn dress of mine in a trunkful of things put away here; it's a little too juvenile for me, now, and, besides, I'm in mourning. May I put you into it?"

"But I should feel so odd, so frivolous. I'm such a staid, solemn person."

"But the dress is staid, too,—a dear little austerity of a dress;—it's just as much you as that way of doing your hair is. Don't imagine that I would commit such a solecism as to dress you frivolously. Look; will you put this on at once,—to please me?"

She had drawn the delicate thing, all falls and plaitings of palest blue, from a closet, and, shaking it out, looked up with quite serious eyes of supplication. It was impossible not to yield. Laughing, frightened, charmed, Mary allowed Mrs. Upton to dress her, and then surveyed herself in the long mirror with astonishment. She couldn't but own that it was herself, though such a transfigured self. She didn't feel out of place, though she felt new and strange.

"Now, Mary, go down to them and see to it that they all do as I say," Valerie insisted. "Imogen is to take Sir Basil to the club;—Miss Bocock is to garden with me—tell her particularly that I count upon her. Jack is to take you for a drive. And, Mary," she put her hand for a moment on the girl's shoulder, grave for all her recovered lightness;—"you are not to talk of sad things to Jack. You must help me about Jack. You must cheer him;—make him forget. You must talk of all the things you used to talk of before—before either I or Imogen came."

They were all on the veranda when Mary went down; all, that is, but Rose and Eddy. Sir Basil and Miss Bocock were deep in letters. Imogen, seated on a step, the sunlight playing over her fluttering black, endured—it was evident that enjoyment made no part of her feeling—a vivid and emphatic account from Jack of some recent political occurrence. He was even reading, here and there, bits from the newspaper he held, and Mary fancied that there was an unnatural excitement in his voice, an unusual eagerness in his eye, with neither of which had he in the least infected Imogen.

On seeing Mary appear he dropped the newspaper and joined her in the hall, drawing her from there into the little library. "Well?—Well?—" he questioned keenly.

He had no eyes for her transformation, Mary noted that, although Imogen, in the instant of her appearance, had fixed grave and astonished eyes upon her. She repeated her message.

"Well, do you know," said Jack, "we can't obey her. I'm so sorry;—I should have liked the drive with you, Mary, of all things; but it turns out that I can't take anybody this morning, I've some letters, just come, that must be answered by return. But, Mary, see here," his voice dropped and his keenness became more acute;—"help me about it. See that she goes. She needs it."

"Needs it?"

"Don't you see that she's worn out?"

"Jack, only this morning, I've begun to suspect it;—what is the matter?"

"Everything. Everything is the matter. So, she mustn't be allowed to take all the drudgery on her hands. Miss Bocock may go to the club with Imogen; she's just ready to go, she wants to go;—and Mrs. Upton must have the drive with Sir Basil. He'd far rather drive with her than walk with Imogen," said Jack brazenly.

"I suppose so, they are such great friends;—only;—drudgery?—She likes Miss Bocock. She likes gardening,"—Mary's breath was almost taken away by his tense decisiveness.

"She likes Sir Basil better"; Jack said it in the freest manner, a manner that left untouched any deeper knowledge that they might both be in possession of. "Imogen likes him better, too. It's for that, so that Imogen may have the best of it, that she's taking Miss Bocock off Imogen's hands;—you see, I see that you do. So, you just stay here and keep still about your counter-demands, while I manage it."

"But Jack,—you bewilder me!—I ought to give my message. I hate managing."

"I'll see that your message is given."

"But how can you?—Jack—what are you planning?"

He was going and, with almost an impatience of her Puritan scruples, he paused at the door to reply:—"Don't bother. I'm all right. I won't manage it. I'll simply have it so."

Half an hour later Valerie came down-stairs wearing her white hat with its black ribbons and drawing on her gardening gloves. And in the large, cool hall, holding his serviceable letters, Jack awaited her.

"I hope you won't mind," he announced, but in the easiest tones; "we can't obey you this morning. Miss Bocock's gone off to the club with Imogen, and Sir Basil is going to take you for a drive."

Valerie, standing on the last step of the stair, a little above him, paused in the act of adjusting her glove, to stare at him. Easy as his tone was he couldn't hide from her that he wore a mask.

"Was Mary too late to give my message?"

"Yes;—that is, no, not exactly; but the club had been arranged and Miss Bocock was eager about it and knew you wouldn't mind, especially as Sir Basil set his heart on the drive with you, when he heard that I couldn't go."

"That you couldn't go?—but you sent Mary to ask me."

"I had to waive my claim,—I've just had these letters"; he held them up. "Very important; they must be answered at once; it will take all my morning, and, of course, when Sir Basil heard that, he jumped at his chance."

Valerie was still on the step above him, fully illuminated, and, as, with that careful ease, he urged Sir Basil's eagerness upon her, he saw—with what a throb of the heart, for her, for himself—that her deep flush rose.

Oh, she loved him. She couldn't conceal it, not from the eyes that watched her now. And was she glad of an unasked-for help, or did her pride suspect help and resent it? Above all did she know how in need of help she was?

He hadn't been able to prevent his eyes from turning from the blush; they avowed, he feared, the consciousness that he would hide; but, after a little moment, in the same voice of determined, though cautious penetration, Valerie questioned: "Is Imogen just gone?"

"She has been gone these fifteen minutes," said Jack, striving to conceal triumph.

"And Mary?"

"Mary?"

"Yes; where is Mary? Is she left out of all your combinations?"

She did probe, then, though her voice was so mild, the voice, only, of the slightly severe, slightly displeased hostess who finds her looms entangled.

"Mary always has a lot to do."

"Sir Basil shall take Mary," said Valerie cheerfully, as though she picked up the thread and found a way out of the silly chaos of his making.

And at this crisis, this check from the goddess who wouldn't be served, Jack's new skill rose to an almost sinister height. Without a flaw in their apparent candor, his eyes met hers while he said:—"Please don't upset my little personal combination. It's very selfish of me, I know;—but I wanted to keep Mary for myself this morning. I've seen so little of her of late; and I need her to talk over my letters with; they're about things we are both interested in."

Valerie looked fixedly at him while he made this statement, and he couldn't tell what her look meant. But, evidently, she yielded to his counter-stratagem, feeling it, no doubt, unavoidable, for the buggy just then drew up before the door, and the figure of Sir Basil appeared above.

"I am in luck!" said Sir Basil. Excitement as well as eagerness was visible in him. Valerie did not look up at him, though she smiled vaguely, coming down from her step and selecting a parasol on her way to the door. Jack was beside her, and he saw that the flush still stayed. He seemed to see, too, that she was excited and eager, but, more than all, that she was frightened. Yet she kept, for him, her quiet voice.

Before Sir Basil joined them she had time to say:—"You are rather mysterious, Jack. If you have deep-laid plans, I would rather you paid me the compliment of showing me the deepest one at once. I am not being nasty to you," she smiled faintly. "Find Mary at once, you must have wasted a lot of time already in getting to those letters."

Jack stood in the doorway while they drove off. Valerie, though now very pale, in the shadow of her hat, showed all her gay tranquillity, and she was very lovely. Sir Basil must see that. He must see that, and all the other things, that, perhaps, he had forgotten for a foolish moment.

Jack felt himself, this morning, in a category where he had never thought it possible that he should find himself. It was difficult to avoid the conviction that he had, simply, lied two or three times in order to send Mrs. Upton and Sir Basil off together in their long, swaying, sunny solitude. Jack had never imagined it possible that he should lie. But, observing, as he was forced to, the blot on his neat, clean conscience, he found himself considering it without a qualm. His only qualm was for its success. The drive would justify him. He almost swore it to himself, as Valerie's parasol disappeared among the trees. The drive would justify him, and reinstate Sir Basil. Unless Sir Basil were a fool, what he had done was well done.

Yet, when they had disappeared, it was with the saddest drop to anxious, to gnawing uncertainty, that Jack turned back into the house. An echo of the fear that he had felt in Valerie seemed to float back to him. It was as if, in some strange way, he had handed her over to pain rather than to joy, to sacrifice rather than to attainment.



XXVII

Jack's morning was not a happy one. It was bad enough to have told so many fibs, or, at all events, to have invented so many opportune truths, and it was worse to have to go on inventing more of them to Mary, now that his dexterities had linked him to her.

Mary looked, as was only too natural, much surprised, when he told her that his letters required her help. She looked still more so when she found how inadequate were their contents to account for such a claim.

Indeed there was, apparently, but one letter upon which her advice could be of the least significance, and after she had given him all the information she had to give in regard to the charity for which it appealed, there was really nothing more for them to do.

"But—the letters that required the immediate answers?" she asked.

Jack's excited, plausible manner had dropped from him. Mary felt it difficult to be severe when his look of dejection was piercing her heart; still, she felt that she owed it to him as well as to herself, she must see a little more clearly into how he had "had things so."

He replied, his eye neither braving nor evading hers, that he had already answered them; and Mary, after a little pause, in which she studied her friend's face, said:—"I don't understand you this morning, Jack."

"I'm afraid you'll understand me less when I make you a confession. I didn't give your message this morning, Mary."

"Didn't give Mrs. Upton's message, to Miss Bocock, to Sir Basil?"

"No," said Jack, but with more mildness and sadness than compunction;—"I want to be straight with you, at all events. So I'd rather tell you. All I did was to say to Sir Basil that I found I couldn't take Mrs. Upton for the drive I'd promised, so that if he wanted to take my place, he was welcome to the buggy. He wanted to, of course. That went without saying."

"Why, Jack Pennington!"

"Miss Bocock, luckily, was on the other side of the veranda, so that I had only to go round to her afterward and tell her that Mrs. Upton had suggested their gardening, but that since she was going to drive with Sir Basil she could go off to the club, at once, too, with Imogen."

"But, Jack!—what did you mean by it?"—Mary, quite aghast, stared at her Machiavellian friend.

"Why, that Sir Basil should take her. That's all I meant from the beginning, when I proposed going myself. Do forgive me, you dear old brick. You see, I'm so awfully set on her not being done out of things."

"Done out of things?"

"Oh, little things, if you like, young things. She's young, and she ought to have them. Say you forgive me."

"Of course, Jack dear, I forgive you, though I don't understand you. But that's not the point. Everything seems so queer, so twisted; every one seems different. And to find you not straight is worst of all."

"I promise you, it's my last sin," said Jack.

Mary, though shaking her bewildered head, had to smile a little, and, the smile encouraging him to lightness, he remarked on her changed aspect.

"So do forgive and forget. I had to confess, when I'd not been true to you. Really, my nature isn't warped. What an extremely becoming dress that is Mary;—and what have you done to your hair?"

"It's she," said Mary, flushing with pleasure.

"Mrs. Upton?"

"Yes, she did my hair and gave me the dress. She was so sweet and dear."

Jack lightly touched a plaited ruffle of the wide sleeve, and Mary felt that he had never less thought of her than when he so touched her dress. She put aside the deep little pang that gave her to say: "It's true, Jack, she ought to have young things, just because they are going from her; one feels that: She oughtn't to be standing back, and giving up things, yet. I see a little what you mean. Isn't it pretty?" Still, with an absent hand, he lightly touched, here and there, a ruffle of her sleeve. "But it's like her. I hardly feel myself in it."

"You've never so looked yourself," said Jack. "That's what she does, brings out people's real selves."

Mrs. Upton and Sir Basil did not come back to lunch, and Imogen's face was somber indeed as she faced her guests at the table. Jack, vigilant and pitiless, guessed at the turmoil of her soul.

She asked him, with an icy sweetness, how his letters had prospered. "Did you get them all off?"

Jack said that he had, and Mary, casting a wavering glance at him, saw that if he intended to sin no more, he showed, at all events, a sinful guilelessness of demeanor. She herself began to blush so helplessly and so furiously that Imogen's attention was drawn to her. Imogen, also, was vigilant.

"And what have you been doing, Mary dear?" she asked.

"I—oh"—poor Mary looked the sinful one;—"I—helped Jack a little."

"Helped Jack?—Oh, yes, he had heaps of letters, hadn't he? What were they all about, Mary?"

"Oh, charities."

"Charities?—What charities? How many charities?—I'm interested in that, you know—I'm rather hurt that you didn't ask my advice, too," and Imogen smiled her ominous smile. "What were the charities?"

Mary, crimson to the brow, her eyes on her plate, now did her duty.

"There was only one."

"One—and that of such consequence that Jack had to give up his drive because of it?—what an interesting letter."

"There were other letters, of course," Jack, in aid of his innocent accomplice, struck in. "None that would have particularly interested you, Imogen. I only needed advice about the one, a local Boston affair."

"There were others, Mary," said Imogen, laughing a little, "You needn't look so guilty on Jack's account." Mary gave her a wide, startled stare.

"You see, Mary," said Rose, after lunch in the drawing-room, "saints can sting."

"What was the matter!" Mary murmured, her head still seemed to buzz, as though from a violent box on the ear. "I never heard Imogen speak like that. To hurt one!"

"I fancy she'd been getting thwarted in some way," said Rose comfortably; "saints do sting, then, sometimes, the first thing that happens to be at hand. How Jack and she hate each other!"

Mary went away to her room and cried.

Meanwhile Jack wandered about in the woods until, quite late in the afternoon, he saw from the rustic bench, where, finally, he had cast himself, the returning buggy climbing up through the lower woodlands.

He felt that his heart throbbed heavily as he watched it, just catching glimpses, among the trees, of the white bubble of Valerie's parasol slanting against the sun. Yet there was a dullness in his excitement. It was over, at all events. He was sure that the last die was cast. And his own trivial and somewhat indecorous part, of shifter of scenes and puller of strings, was, he felt sure, a thing put by forever. He could help her no longer. And in a sort of apathy, he sat out there in the sunny green, hardly thinking, hardly wondering, conscious only of a hope that had become a mere physical sense of oppression and of an underlying sadness that had become, almost, a physical sense of pain.

He had just consulted his watch and, seeing it wanted but ten minutes to tea-time, had got up and was moving away, when a sudden rustle near him, a pause, a quick, evasive footstep, warned him of some presence as anxious for solitude as himself.

He stood still for a moment, uncertain as to his own best means of retreat, but his stillness misled, for, in another moment, Valerie appeared before him from among the branches of a narrow side path.

She had come up to the woods directly; he saw that, for she still wore her hat; she had come to be alone and to weep; and, as she saw Jack, her pale face was convulsed, with the effort to control her weeping, into a strange rigor of pain and confusion.

"Oh"—he stammered. "Forgive me. I didn't know you were here." He was turning to flee, as if from a sacrilege, when she recalled him.

"Don't—without me. I must go back, too," she said.

She stepped on to the broader path and joined him, and he guessed that she tested, on him, her power to face the others. But, after they had gone a few steps together, she stopped suddenly and put her hands before her face, standing quite still.

And Jack understood that she was helpless and that he must say nothing. She stood so for a long moment, not trusting herself to move or speak. Then, uncovering her face, she showed him strange eyes from which the tears had been crushed back.

"And—I can do nothing?—" he said at last, on the lowest breath, as they walked on.

"Nothing, dear Jack."

"When you are suffering like that!"

"I have no right to such suffering. I must hide it. Help me to hide it, Jack. Do I look fairly decent?" She turned her face to him, with, he thought, the most valorous smile he had ever seen.

Only a thin screen of leaves was between them and the open.

"You look—beautiful," said Jack. She smiled on, as though that satisfied her, and he added, "Can I know nothing?—See nothing?"

"I think already," said Valerie, "that you see more than I ever meant any one to see."

"I?—I see nothing, now," he almost moaned.

"You shall. I'll talk to you later."

"You will? If only you knew how I cared!"

"I do, dear Jack."

"Not how much, not how much. You can't know that. It almost gives me my right, you know, to see. When will you talk to me?"

"Some time to-night, when we can have a quiet moment. I'll tell you about the things that have happened—nothing to make you sad, I hope. And I'll ask you some questions, too, Jack, about your very odd behavior!"

Really she was wonderful; it was almost her own gaiety, flickering like pale sunlight upon her face, that she had regained, and, as they went together over the lawn to where the tea-table was laid in the shade, he saw that she could face them all. No one would know. And her last words had given him heart, had lifted, a little, the heavy weight of foreboding. Perhaps, perhaps, her grief wasn't for herself. "Oh, but I can't be candid till you are," he said, the new hope shining in his eyes.

"Oh, yes, you will be," she returned. "You won't ask me to be candid. You'll give and not ask to get back. I know you, Jack."

No one could guess; Sir Basil least of all. That was apparent to Jack as he watched them all sitting at tea under the apple-trees. Sir Basil had never looked so radiant, so innocent of any connection with suffering. He exclaimed over the beauties of their long drive. They had crossed hill and dale; they had lost their way; they had had lunch at a village hotel, an amusing lunch, ending with ice-cream and pie, and, from the undiminished reflection of his contentment on Valerie's features, Jack knew that any faintest hint of the pale, stricken anguish of the woodlands had never for an instant hovered during the drive. This was the face that Sir Basil had seen for all the happy, sunny, picnic day, this face of gay tranquillity.

Sir Basil and Mrs. Upton, indeed, expressed what gaiety there was among the group. Mary, in her blue lawn, looked very dreary. Rose and Eddy were ill-tempered, their day, plainly, having ended in a quarrel. As for Imogen, Jack had felt her heavy eye rest upon him and her mother as they came together over the lawn, and felt it rest upon her mother and Sir Basil steadily and somberly, while they sat about the tea-table. The long drive, Sir Basil's radiance, her mother's serenity, how must they look to Imogen? Jack could conjecture, though knowing, for his own bitter mystification, that what they looked like was perhaps not what they meant. Imogen must be truly at bay, and he felt a cruel satisfaction in the thought of her hidden, her gnawing anxiety. He was aware of every ring of falsity in her placid voice and of every flash of fierceness under the steeled calmness of her eye. He noticed, too, for the rest of the day, that, whatever Imogen's desperation, she made no effort to see Sir Basil alone. Almost ostentatiously she went away to her room after tea, saying that she had had bad news of an invalid protege and must write to her. She paused, as she went, to lean over Mary, a caressing hand upon her shoulder, and to speak to her in a low tone. Mary grew very red, stammered, and said nothing.

"Miss Upton overworks, I think," observed Miss Bocock. "I've thought that she seemed overstrained all day."

Mary had risen too, and as she wandered away into the flower garden, Jack followed her.

"See here," he said, "has Imogen been hurting you again?"

"No, Jack, oh no;—I'm sure she doesn't mean to hurt."

"What did she say to you just now?"

"Well, Jack, you did bring it upon yourself, and upon me"—

"What was it?"

"She said that she couldn't bear to see her white flower—that's I, you know,"—Mary blushed even deeper in repeating the metaphor—"used for unworthy ends. She meant, of course, I see that,—she meant that what she said at lunch was for you and not for me. I'm sure that Imogen means to be kind—always."

"I believe she does."

"I'm glad that you feel that, too, Jack. It is so horrible to see oneself as—oh, really disloyal sometimes."

"You need never feel that, Mary."

"Oh, but I do. And now, when everything, every one, seems turning against Imogen! And she has seemed different;—yet for two years she has been a revelation of everything noble to me."

"You only saw her in noble circumstances."

"Oh, Jack," Mary's eyes were full of tears as she looked at him now, "that's the worst of all; that you have come to speak of her like that."



XXVIII

Even Valerie couldn't dispel the encompassing cloud of gloom at dinner. One couldn't do much in such a fog but drift with it. And Jack saw that she was fit for no more decisive action.

Imogen, pale, and almost altogether silent, said that she was very tired, and went up-stairs early. Rose and Eddy, in a shaded corner of the drawing-room, engaged in a long altercation. The others talked, in desultory fashion, till bedtime. No one seemed fit for more than drifting.

It was hardly eleven when Jack was left alone with Mrs. Upton.

"You are tired, too," he said to her; "dreadfully tired. I mustn't ask for our talk."

"I should like a little stroll in the moonlight." Valerie, at the open window, was looking out. "In a night or two it will be too late for us to see. We'll have our walk and our talk, Jack."

She rang for her white chuddah, told the maid to put out the lamps, and that she and Mr. Pennington would shut the house when they came in. From the darkened house they stepped into the warm, pale night. They went in silence over the lawn and, with no sense of choice, took the mossy path that led to the rustic bench where they had met that afternoon.

It was not until they were lost in the obscurity of the woods that Valerie said, very quietly: "Do you remember our talk, Jack, on that evening in New York, after the tableaux?"

He had followed along the path just behind her; but now he came to her side so that he could see her shadowy face. "Yes;—the evening in which we saw that Imogen and Sir Basil were going to be friends."

"And the evening," said Valerie, "when you showed me plainly, at last, that because I seemed gold to you, Imogen's blue had turned to green."

"Yes;—I remember."

"It has faded further and further away, her blue, hasn't it?"

"Yes," he confessed.

"So that you are hardly friends, Jack?"

He paused for a moment, and then completed his confession:—"We are not friends."

Valerie stood still, breathing as if with a little difficulty after the gradual ascent. The tall trees about them were dark and full of mystery on the pale mysterious sky. Through the branches they could see the glint of the moon's diminished disk.

"That is terrible, you know," said Valerie, after they had stood in silence for some moments.

"I know it."

"For both of you."

"Worse for me, because I cared more, really cared more."

"No, worse for her, for it is you who have judged and rejected her."

"She thinks that it is she who has judged and rejected me."

"She tries to think it; she does not always succeed. It has been bitter, it has been cruel for her."

"Oh, yes, bitter and cruel," he assented.

"Don't try to minimize her pain, Jack."

"You feel that I can't care, much?"

"It is horrible for me to feel it. Think of her when I came, so secure, so calm, so surrounded by love and appreciation. And now"—Valerie walked on, as if urged to motion by the controlled force of her own insistence. Was it an appeal to him that Imogen, dispossessed of the new love, might find again the old love opening to her? He clung to the hope, though with a sickening suspicion of its folly.

"By my coming, I have robbed her of everything," Valerie was saying, walking swiftly up the path and breathing as if with that slight difficulty—the sound of her breaths affected him with an almost intolerable sense of expectancy. "She isn't secure;—she isn't calm. She is warped;—her faiths are warped. Her friends are changed to her. She has lost you. It's as if I had shattered her life."

"Everything that wasn't real you have shattered."

The rustic bench was reached and they paused there, though with no eyes for the shaft of mystic distance that opened before them. Jack's eyes were on her and he was conscious of a rising insistence in himself that matched and opposed her own.

"But you must be sorry for her pain," said Valerie, and now, with eyes almost stern in their demand, she gazed at him;—"you must be sorry that she has had to lose so much. And you would be glad, would you not, to think that real things, a new life, were to come to her?"

He understood; even before the words, his fear, his presage, leaped forward to this crashing together of all his hopes. And it seemed to him that a flame passed through him, shriveling in its ardent wrath all trite reticences and decorums.

"No; no, I should not be glad," he answered. His voice was violent; the eyes he fixed on her were violent. His words struck Imogen out of his life for ever.

"Why are you so cruel?" she faltered.

"I am cruel for you. I know what you want to do. You are going to give her your life."

Quick as a flash she answered—it was like a rapier parrying his stroke:—"Give?—what have I to do with it, if it comes to her?"

"Everything! Everything!" he cried.

"Nothing. You are mistaken."

"Ah,—you could keep it, you could keep it—if you tried." And now his eyes pleaded—pleaded with her, for her own life's sake, to keep what was hers. "You have only to show her to him, as you did to me."

"You think—I could do that!—to my child!"—Through the darkness her white face looked a wild reproach at him.

He seized her hands:—"It's to do her no wrong!—It's only to be true, consciously, to him, as you were true, unconsciously, to me. It's only, not to let her rob you—not to let her rob him."

"Jack," she breathed heavily, "these are things that cannot be said."

"They must—they must—now, between us. I have my right. I've cared enough—to do anything, so that she should not rob you!" Jack groaned.

"She has not robbed me. It left me;—it went to her;—I saw it all. Even if I had been base enough, even if I had tried to keep it by showing her to him—as you say so horribly,—even then I should not have kept it. He would not have seen. Don't you understand;—he is not that sort of man. She will always be blue to him, and I will always be gold—though perhaps, now, a little tarnished. That's what is so beautiful in him—and so stupid. He doesn't see colors, as you and I do, Jack. That's what makes me sure that this is the happiest of fortunes for them both."

He had held her hands, gazing at her downcast face, its strength speaking from the shadow, its pain hidden from him, and now, before her resolution and her gentleness, he bent his head upon the hands he held. "Oh, but you, you, you!—It's you whose life is shattered!" broke from him with a sob.

For a long while she stood silent above him, her hands enfolding his, as though she comforted his grief. He found himself at length kissing the gentle hands, with tears, and then, caressing his bent head with a light touch, she said: "Don't you see that the time has come for me to accept shatterings as in the order of things, dear Jack?—My mistake has been to believe that life can begin over again. It can't. One uses it up—merely by waiting. I've been an incurable girl till now;—and now, I've crashed from girlhood to middle-age in a week! It's been a crash, of course; the sort of crash one never mends of; but after to-day, after you sent me off with him, Jack, and I allowed myself, in spite of all my dread, my pride, my relinquishment, just one flicker of girlish hope,—after all this, I think that I must put on caps to show that I am really old at last."

He lifted his head and looked at her. Her face was lovely, with the silver disk of the moon above it and, about it, the mystery and sadness of the tranquil woods. So lovely, so young, with almost the trembling touch of a tender mockery, like the trembling of moonlit water, upon it. And all that he found to say at last was:—"What a fool he is."

She really smiled then, though tears sprang to her eyes with her comprehension of all that the helpless, boyish words struggled to subdue.

"Thanks for that, dear Jack,—and for all the other mistakes," she said.

There seemed nothing more to say, no questions to ask, or to answer. He must accept from her that her plight was irrevocable. It was as if he had seen a great stone rolled over the quivering, springing, shining fountain, sealing it, stilling it for ever. And, for his part, her word covered all. His "mistakes" needed no further revealing.

They had turned and, in silence, were moving down the path again, when they heard, suddenly, the sound of light, swift footsteps approaching them. They paused, exchanging a glance of wonder; and Jack thought that he saw fear in Valerie's eyes. The day, already, had held overmuch of endurance for her, and it was not yet ended. In another moment, tall and illumined, Imogen appeared before them in the path.

Jack knew, in thinking it over afterward, that Imogen at her most baleful had been Imogen at her most beautiful. She had looked, as she emerged from shadow into light, like a virgin saint bent on some wild errand through the night, an errand brought to a proud pause, in which was no fear and no hesitancy, as her path was crossed by the spirits of an evil world. That was really just what she looked like, standing there before them, bathed in light, her eyes profound and stern, her hair crowning her with a glory of transmuted gold, her head uplifted with a high, unfaltering purpose. That the shock of finding them there before her was great, one saw at once; and one could gage the strength of her purpose from her instantaneous surmounting of the shock.

And it was strange, in looking back, to remember how the time of colorless light and colorless shadow had seemed to divest them all of daily conventions and daily seemings. They might have been three disembodied souls met there in the moonlit woods and speaking the direct, unimpeded language of souls, for whom all concealments are useless.

"Oh—it is you," was what Imogen said; much as the virgin saint might have greeted the familiar demons who opposed her quest. You, meant both of them. She put them together into one category of evil, saw them as one in their enmity to her and to good. And she seemed to accept them as very much what a saint might expect to find on such a nocturnal errand.

Involuntarily Valerie had fallen back, and she had put her hand on Jack's shoulder in confusion more than in fear. Yet, feeling a menace in the white, shining presence, her voice faltered as she asked: "Imogen, what are you doing here?"

And it was at this point that Imogen reached, really, her own culmination. Whatever shame, whatever hesitation, whatever impulsion to deceive when deception was so easy, she may have felt; to lie, when a lie would be so easily convincing, she rejected and triumphed over. Jack knew from her uplifted look that the moment would count with her always as one of her great ones one of the moments in which—as she had used to say to him sometimes in the days that were gone forever—one knew that one had "beat down Satan under one's feet."

"You have no right to ask me that," she said, "but I choose to answer you. I have come here to meet Sir Basil."

"Meet him?" It was in pure bewilderment that Valerie questioned, helplessly, without reproach.

"Meet him. Yes. What have you to say to it?"

"But why meet him?—Why now?" The wonder on Valerie's face had broken to almost merriment. "Did he ask you to?—Really, really, he oughtn't to. Really, my child, I can't have you meeting Sir Basil in the woods at midnight."

"You can't have me meeting him in the woods at midnight?" Imogen repeated, an ominous cadence, holding her head high and taking long breaths. "You say that, dare say it, when you well know that I can meet him nowhere else and in no other way. It was I who asked him to meet me here and it is here, confronted with you, if you so choose; it is here, before you and under God's stars, that I shall know the truth from him. I am not ashamed; I am proud to say it;—I love him. And though you scheme, and stoop and strive to take him from me—you, with Jack to help you—Jack to lie for you—as he did this morning,—I know, I know in my heart and soul that he loves me, that he is mine."

"Jack!—Jack!" Valerie cried. She caught him back, for he started forward to seize, to gag her daughter; "Jack—remember, remember!—She doesn't understand!"

"Oh, he may strike me if he wills." Imogen had stood quite still, not flinching.

"I don't want to strike you—you—you idiot!"—Jack was gasping. "I want to force you to your knees, before your mother—who loves you—as no one else who knows you will ever love you!" And, helplessly, his old words, so trite, so inadequate, came back to him. "You self-centered, you self-righteous, you cold-hearted girl!"

Valerie still held his arm with both hands, leaning upon him.

"Imogen," she said, speaking quickly, "you needn't meet Sir Basil in this way;—there is nothing to prevent you from seeing him where and when you will. You are right in believing that he loves you. He asked me this morning for your hand. And I gave him my consent."

From a virgin saint Imogen, as if with the wave of a wand, saw herself turned into a rather foolish genie, so transformed and then, ever so swiftly, run into a bottle;—it was surely the graceful seal firmly affixed thereto when she heard these words of conformity to the traditions of dignified betrothal. And for once in her life, so bottled and so sealed, she looked, as if through the magic crystal of her mother's words, absolutely, helplessly foolish. It is difficult for a genie in a bottle to look contrite or stricken with anything deeper than astonishment; nor is it practicable in such a situation to fall upon one's knees,—if a genie were to feel such an impulse of self-abasement. It was perhaps a comfort to all concerned, including a new-comer, that Imogen should be reduced to the silence of sheer stupefaction; and as Sir Basil appeared among them it was not at him, after her first wide glance, that she looked, but, still as if through the crystal bottle, at her mother, and the look was, at all events, a confession of utter inadequacy to deal with the situation in which she found herself.

It was Valerie, once more, who steered them all past the giddy whirlpool. Jack, beside her, his heart and brain turning in dizzy circles, marveled at her steadiness of eye, her clearness of voice. He would have liked to lean against a tree and get his breath; but this delicate creature, rising from her rack, could move forward to her place beside the helm, and smile!

"Sir Basil," she said, and she put out her hand to him so mildly that Sir Basil may well have thought his rather uncomfortable rendezvous redeemed into happiest convention, "here we all are waiting for you, and here we are going to leave you, you and Imogen, to take a walk and to say some of all the things you will have to say to each other. Give me your hand, Imogen. There, dear friend, I think that it is yours, and I trust her life to you with, my blessing. Now take your walk, I will wait for you, as late as you like, in the drawing-room."

So was the bottled genie released, so did it resume once more the figure of a girl, hardly humbled, yet, it must be granted, deeply confused. In perfect silence Imogen walked away beside her suitor, and it may be said that she never told him of the little episode that had preceded his arrival. Jack and Valerie went slowly on toward the house. Now that she had grasped the helm through the whirlpool he almost expected that she would fall upon the deck. But, silently, she walked beside him, not taking his arm, wrapped closely in her shawl, and, once more inside the dark drawing-room, she proceeded to light the candles on the mantel-piece, saying that she would wait there until the others came in, smiling very faintly as she added:—"That everything may be done properly and in order." Jack walked up and down the room, his hands deeply thrust into the pockets of his dining-jacket.

"As for you, you had better go to bed," Valerie went on after a moment. She had placed the candles on a table, taken a chair near them and chosen a review. She turned the pages while she spoke.

At this, he, too, being disposed of, he stopped before her. "And you wanted me to be glad!"

Her eyes on the unseen print, she turned her pages, and now that they were out of the woods and surrounded by walls and furniture and everyday symbols, he saw that the pressure of his presence was heavier, and that she blushed a deep, weary blush. But she was able and willing quite to dispose of him. "I want you to be glad," she answered.

"For her!"—For that creature!—his words implied.

"It was natural, what she thought," said Valerie after a moment, though not looking up.

"Natural!—To suspect you!"—

"Of what you wanted me to do?" Valerie asked. "Yes, it was quite natural, I think, and partly because of your manoeuvers, my poor Jack. I understand it all now. But the cause you espoused was already a doomed one, you see."

"Oh!" he almost groaned. "You doomed it! Don't you feel any pity for him?"

Valerie continued to look at her page, silently, for a moment, and it was now indeed as though his question found some reverberating echo in herself. But, in the silent moment, she thought it out swiftly and surely, grasping old clues.

"No, Jack," she said, and she was giving herself, as well as him, the final answer, "I don't pity him. He will never see Imogen baffled, warped, at bay,—as we have. He will always see her crowned, successful, radiant. She will count tremendously over there, far more than I ever would, because she's so different, because she cares such a lot. And Imogen must count to be radiant. She will help him in all sorts of ways, give him a new life; she will help everybody. Do you remember what Eddy said of her, that if it weren't for people of the Imogen type the cripples would die off like anything!—That was true. She is one of the people who make the wheels of the world go round. And it's a revival for a man like Sir Basil to live with such a person. With me he would have faded back into the onlooker at life; with Imogen he will live. And then, above all, quite above all, he is in love with her. I think that he fell in love with her at first sight, as Antigone, at her loveliest, except for to-night; to-night was her very loveliest—because it was so real;—she would have claimed him from me—before me—if he had come then; and her belief in herself, didn't you see, Jack, how it illumined her?—And then, Jack, and this I'm afraid you are forgetting, Imogen is a good girl, a very good girl. I can trust him to her, you know. Her object in life will be to love him in the most magnificent way possible. His happiness will be as much of an end to her as her own."

It was, perhaps, the culminating symptom of his initiation, of his transformation, when Jack, who had considered her while she spoke, standing perfectly still, his hands in his pockets, his head bent, his eyes steadily on her, now, finding nothing better to do than obey her first suggestion and go to bed, took her hand before going, put it to his lips—and his glance, as he kissed her hand, brought the tears, again, to Valerie's eyes—and said: "Damn goodness."



XXIX

Imogen was, indeed, crowned and radiant. And, safe on her eminence, recovered from the breathlessness of her rather unbecoming vigorous ascent, she found her old serenity, her old benignity, safely enfolded her once more. In looking down upon the dusty lowlands, where she had been blind and bitter, she could afford to smile over herself, even to shake her head a little over the vehemence of her own fear and courage. It was to have lacked faith, to have lacked wisdom, the showing of such vehemence; yet, who knew, without it, perhaps, she might not have escaped the nets that had been laid for her feet, for Basil's feet, too, his strong and simple nature making him helpless before sly ambushes. Jack, in declaring himself her enemy, had effectually killed the last faint wailing that had so piteously, so magnanimously, sounded on for him in her heart. He had, by his trickster's dexterity, proved to her, if she needed proof, that she had chosen the higher. A man who could so stoop—to lies—was not the man for her. To say nothing of his iniquity, his folly was apparent. For Jack had behaved like a fool, he must see that himself, in his espousal of a lost cause.

Jack as delinquent stood plain, and she would accuse no one else. In the bottom of Imogen's heart lingered, however, the suspicion that only when her mother had seen the cause as lost, the contest as useless, had she hastily assumed the dignified attitude that, for the dizzy, moonlit moment, had, so humiliatingly, sealed her, Imogen, into the magic bottle. Imogen suspected that she hadn't been so wrong, nor her mother so magnanimous as had then appeared, and this secret suspicion made it the easier for her to accept the seeming, since to do that was to show herself anybody's equal in magnanimity. She was quite sure that her mother, in her shallow way, had cared for Basil, and not at all sure that she had relinquished her hope at the first symptom of his change of heart. But, though one couldn't but feel stern at the thought, one couldn't, also, repress something of pity for the miscalculation of the defeated love. To feel pity, moreover, was to show herself anybody's equal in heart;—Jack's accusations rankled.

Yes; considering all things, and in spite of the things that, she must always suspect, were hidden, her mother had behaved extremely well.

"And above all," Imogen thought, summing it up in terms at once generous and apt, "she has behaved like the gentlewoman that she is. With all her littlenesses, all her lacks, mama is essentially that." And the sweetest moments of self-justification were those in which her heart really ached a little for "poor mama," moments in which she wondered whether the love that had come to her, in her great sorrow, high among the pine woods, had ever been her mother's to lose. The wonder made her doubly secure and her mother really piteous.

It was easy, her heart stayed on such heights, to suffer very tolerantly the little stings that flew up to her from the buzzing, startled world. Jack she did not see again, until the day of her wedding, only a month later, and then his face, showing vaguely among the shimmering crowd, seemed but an empty mask of the past. Jack departed early on the morning after her betrothal, and it was only lesser wonders that she had to face. Mary's was the one that teased most, and Imogen might have felt some irritation had that not now been so inappropriate a sensation, before Mary's stare, a stare that seemed to resume and take in, in the moment of stupefaction, a world of new impressions. The memory of Mary staring, with her hair done in a new and becoming way, was to remain for Imogen as a symbol of the vexatious and altered, perhaps the corrupted life, that she was, after all, leaving for good in leaving her native land.

"Sir Basil!—You are going to marry Sir Basil, Imogen!" said Mary.

"Yes, dear. Does that surprise you? Haven't you, really, seen it coming?—We fancied that everyone must be guessing, while we were finding it out for ourselves," Imogen answered, ever so gently.

"No, I never saw it, never dreamed of it."

"It seemed so impossible? Why, Mary dear?"

"I don't know;—he is so much older;—he isn't an American;—you won't live in your own country;—I never imagined you marrying anyone but an American."

The deepest wonder, Imogen knew it very well, was the one she could not express:—I thought that he was in love with your mother.

Imogen smiled over the simplicity of the spoken surprises. "I don't think that the question of years separates people so at one as Basil and I," she said. "You would find how little such things meant, Mary mine, if your calm little New England heart ever came to know what a great love is. As for my country, my country will be my husband's country, but that will not make me love my old home the less, nor make me forget all the things that life has taught me here, any more than I shall be the less myself for being a bigger and better self as his wife." And Imogen looked so uplifted in saying it that poor, bewildered Mary felt that Mrs. Upton, after all, was right, one couldn't tell where rightness was. Such love as Imogen's couldn't be wrong. All the same, she was not sorry that Imogen, all transfigured as she undoubtedly was, should be going very far away. Mary did not feel happy with Imogen any longer.

Rose took the tidings in a very unpleasant manner; but then Rose didn't count; in any circumstances her effrontery went without saying. One simply looked over it, as in this case, when it took the form of an absolute silence, a white, smiling silence.

Oddly enough, from the extreme of Rose's anger, came Eddy's chance. She didn't tell Eddy that she saw his mother as robbed and that, in silence, her heart bled for her; but she did say to him, several days after Imogen's announcement, that, yes, she would.

"I know that I should be bound to take you some day, and I'd rather do it just now when your mother has quite enough bothers to see to without having your anxieties on her mind! I'll never understand anyone so well as I do you, or quarrel with anyone so comfortably;—and besides," Rose added with characteristic impertinence, "the truth is, my dear, that I want to be your mother's daughter. It's that that has done it. I want to show her how nice a daughter can be to her. I want to take Imogen's place. I'll be an extremely bad wife, Eddy, but a good daughter-in-law. I adore your mother so much that for her sake I'll put up with you."

Eddy said that she might adore any one as much as she liked so long as she allowed him to put up with her for a lifetime. They did understand each other, these two, and Valerie, though a little troubled by the something hard and bright in their warring courtship, something that, she feared, would make their path, though always illuminated, often rough, could welcome her new daughter with real gladness.

"I know that you'll never care for me, as I do for you," said Rose, "and that you will often scold me; but your scoldings will be my religion. Don't spare them. You are my ideal, you know."

This speech, made in her presence, was, Imogen knew, intended as a cut at herself. She heard it serenely. But Rose was more vexatious than Mary in that she wasn't leaving her behind. Rose was already sparring with Eddy as to when he would take her over to England for a season of hunting. Eddy firmly held himself before her as a poor man, and when Rose dangled her own wealth before him remarked that she could, of course, go without him, if she liked. It was evident, in spite of sparring and hardness, that Rose wouldn't like at all; and evident, too, that Eddy would often be wheedled into a costly holiday. Imogen had to foresee a future of tolerance toward Rose. Their worlds would not do more than merge here and there.

Imogen had, already, very distinct ideas as to her new world. It hovered as important and political; the business of Rose's world would be its relaxation only. For Imogen would never change colors, and her frown for mere fashion would be as sad as ever. She was not to change, she was only to intensify, to become "bigger and better." And this essential stability was not contradicted by the fact that, in one or two instances, she found herself developing. She was glad, and in the presence of Mrs. Wake, gravely to renounce past errors as to the English people. Since coming to know Basil, typical of his race, its flower, as he was, she had come to see how far deeper in many respects, how far more evolved that English character was than their own,—"their," now, signifying "your." "You really saw that before I did, dear Mrs. Wake," said Imogen.

Already Imogen identified herself with her future husband so that the defects of the younger civilization seemed no longer her affair, except in so far as her understanding of them, her love of her dear country, and her new enlightenments, made her the more eager to help. And then they were all of the same race; she was very insistent on that; it was merely that the branch to which she now belonged was a "bigger and better branch." Imogen was none the less a good American for becoming so devoutly English. From her knowledge of the younger, more ardent, civilization, her long training in its noblest school, she could help the old in many ways. England, in these respects, was like her Basil, before she had wakened him. Imogen felt that England, too, needed her. And there was undoubtedly a satisfaction in flashing that new world of hers, so large, so in need of her,—in flashing it, like a bright, and, it was to be hoped, a somewhat dazzling object, before the vexatiously imperturbable eyes of Mrs. Wake. Mrs. Wake's dry smile of congratulation had been almost as unpleasant as Rose's silence.

From Miss Bocock there was neither smile, nor sting, nor silence to endure. Miss Bocock had suspected nothing, either on the mother's side or on the daughter's, and took the announcement very placidly. "Indeed. Really. How very nice. Accept my congratulations," were her comments. Imogen at once asked her to spend a week-end at Thremdon Hall next Spring, and Miss Bocock in the same way said: "Thanks. That will be very nice. I've never stayed there." There was still a subtle irritation in the fact that while Miss Bocock now accepted her, in the order of things, as one of the "county people," as the gracious mistress of Thremdon Hall, as very much above a country doctor's family, she didn't seem to regard her with any more interest or respect as an individual.

These, after all, were the superficialities of the situation; its deeper aspects were, Imogen felt, as yet unfaced. Her mother seemed quite content to let Imogen's silence stand for apology and retractation, quite willing to go on, for the little further that they had to go together, in an ambiguous relation. This was, indeed, Imogen felt, her mother's strength; she could, apparently, put up with any amount of ambiguity and probably looked upon it as an essential part of life. Perhaps, and here Imogen was conscious of a twinge of anxiety, she put up with it so quietly because she didn't recognize it in herself, in her own motives and actions; and this thought teased at Imogen until she determined that she must stand forth in the light and show her mother that she, too, was self-assured and she, too, magnanimous.

She armed herself for the task by a little talk with Sir Basil, the nearest approach they ever allowed themselves to the delicate complexities in which they had come to recognize each other and out of which, to a certain extent, they had had to fight their way to the present harmony. She was with him, again, among the laurels, a favorite place with them, and Imogen sat on her former ledge of sunny rock and Sir Basil was extended beside her on the moss. She had been reading Emerson to him, and when the essay was finished and she had talked to him a little about the "over-soul,"—dear Basil's recollections of metaphysics were very confused,—she presently said to him, letting her hand slide into his while she spoke:—"Basil, dearest,—I want to ask you something, and you must answer very truly, for you need never fear that I would flinch from any truth. Tell me,—did you ever,—ever care for mama?"

Sir Basil, his hat tilted over his eyes, grew very red and looked down at the moss for some moments without replying.

"Of course I know that, in some sense, you did care," said Imogen, a faint tremble in her voice, a tremble that, in its sweet acquiescence to something that was hurting her, touched him infinitely. "I know, too, that there are loves and loves. I know that anything you may have felt for mama is as different from what you feel for me as lamplight is from daylight. I won't speak of it, ever, again, dear Basil; but for this once let me see clearly what was in your past."

"I did care for her," Sir Basil jerked out at that;—"quite tremendously, until I saw you. She will always be a dear friend, one of the dearest, most charming people I've ever known. And, no, it wasn't like lamplight, you know";—something in that analogy was so hurting Sir Basil that it made him, for a moment, forget his darling's hurt;—"that wasn't it. Though, it's quite true, you're like daylight."

"And—and—she?"—Imogen accepted the restatement, though her voice trembled a little more.

He now looked up at her, a clear, blue ray from his honest eyes. "Well, there, you know, it has been a relief. I could never tell, in the past; she showed me nothing, except that friendship; but since she has been free, since I've seen her over here, she has shown me quite clearly, that it was, on her side, only that."

Imogen was silent for a long time. She didn't "know" at all. And there was a great deal to accept; more, oddly enough, than she had ever faced. She had always believed that it had been like lamplight to daylight. But, whatever it had been, the day had conquered it. And how dear, how noble of her lover to show, so unfalteringly, his loyalty to the past. It was with a sigh made up of many satisfactions that she said at last:—"Dear mama;—I am so glad that I took nothing she cared for from her."

It was on that afternoon that she found her time for "standing forth in the light" before her mother.

She didn't want it to be indoors; she felt, vaguely, that four walls would make them too intimate, as it were; shut them into their mutual consciousness too closely. So that when she saw her mother, after tea, watering and gathering her flowers at the edge of the wood, she went out to her, across the grass, sweet and mild in the long white dress that she had worn since joy had come to her.

She wished to be very direct, very simple, very sweet.

"Mama, darling," she said, standing there beside her while Valerie, after a quiet glance up at her, continued to cut her roses;—"I want to say something to you. This seems such a beautiful time to say deep, grave things in, doesn't it, this late afternoon hour? I've wanted to say it since the other night when, through poor Jack's folly of revenge and blindness, we were all put into such an ugly muddle, at such ugly cross-purposes." She paused here and Valerie, giving neither assent nor negation, said: "Yes, Imogen?"

"I want to say to you that I am sorry, mama dear";—Imogen spoke gravely and with emphasis;—"sorry, in the first place, that I should so have misjudged you as to imagine that—at your time of life and after your sobering experience of life—you were involved in a love affair. I see, now, what a wrong that was to do to you—to your dignity, your sense of right and fitness. And I'm sorrier that I should have thought you capable of seconding Jack's attempts to keep from me a love that had drawn to me as a magnet to the north. The first mistake led to the second. I had heard your friends conjecturing as to your feeling for Basil, and the pain of suspecting that of you—my father's new-made widow—led me astray. I think that in any great new experience one's whole nature is perhaps a little off-balance, confused. I had suffered so much, in so many ways;—his death;—Jack's unworthiness;—this fear for you;—and then, in these last days, for what you know, mama, for him, because of him—my father, a suffering that no joy will ever efface, that I was made, I think, for a little time, a stranger to myself. And then came love—wonderful love—and it shook my nature to its depths. I was dazzled, torn, tempest-tossed;—I did not see clearly. Let that be my excuse."

Valerie still stopped over her roses, her fingers delicately, accurately busy, and her face, under the broad brim of her hat, hidden.

Again Imogen paused, the rhythm of her words, like an echo of his voice in her own, bringing a sudden sharp, sweet, reminiscence of her father, so that the tears had risen to her eyes in hearing herself. And again, for all reply, her mother once more said only: "Yes, Imogen."

It was not the reply she had expected, not the reply that she had a right to expect, and, even out there, with the flowers, so impersonally lovely, about them, the late radiance softly bathing them, as if in rays of forgiveness and mild pity, even with the tears, evidences of sorrow and magnanimity, in her eyes, Imogen felt a little at a loss, a little confused.

"That is, all, mama," she said;—"just that I am sorry, and that I want you to feel, in spite of all the sad, the tragic things that there have been between us, that my deep love for you is there, and that you must trust it always."

And now there was another silence. Valerie stooping to her flowers, mysterious, ambiguous indeed, in her shadow, her silence.

Imogen, for all the glory of her mood, felt a thrill of anger, and the reminiscence that came to her now was of her father's pain, his familiar pain, for such shadows, such silences, such blights cast upon his highest impulses. "I hope, mama, that you will always trust my love," she said, mastering the rising of her resentment.

And once more came the monotonous answer, but given this time with a new note:—"Yes, Imogen," her mother replied, "you may always trust my love."

She rose at that, and her eyes passed swiftly across her daughter's face, swiftly and calmly. She was a little flushed, but that might have been from the long bending over the flowers, and if it was a juggling dexterity that she used, she had used it indeed so dexterously that it seemed impossible to say anything more. Imogen could find no words in which to set the turned tables straight.

She had imagined their little scene ending very beautifully in a grave embrace and kiss; but no opportunity was given her for this final demonstration of her spirit of charity. Her mother gathered up her scissors, her watering-pot, her trowel, and handing Imogen the filled basket of roses said, "Will you carry these for me, my dear?"

The tone of quiet, everyday kindness dispelled all glory, and set a lower standard. Here, at this place, very much on the earth, Imogen would always find her, it seemed to say. It said nothing else.

Yet Imogen knew, as she walked back beside her mother, knew quite as well as if her mother had spoken the words, that her proffered love had not been trusted, that she had been penetrated, judged, and, in some irresistible way, a way that brought no punishment and no reproof, nor even any lessening of affection, condemned. Her mother still loved her, that was the helpless conviction that settled upon her; but it was as a child, not as a personality, that she was loved,—very much as Miss Bocock respected her as the mistress of Thremdon Hall and not at all on her own account; but her mother, too, for all her quiet, and all her kindness, thought her "self-centered, self-righteous, cold-hearted," and—Imogen, in a sharp pang of insight, saw it all—because of that would not attempt any soul-stirring appeal or arraignment. She knew too well with what arms of spiritual assurance she would be met.

It was in silence, while they walked side by side, the basket of roses between them, that Imogen fiercely seized these arms, fiercely parried the unuttered arraignment, and, more fiercely, the unuttered love.

She could claim no verbal victory, she had had to endure no verbal defeat; it was she herself who had forced this issue upon a situation that her mother would have been content to leave undefined. Her mother would never fix blame; her mother would never humiliate; but, she had found it to her own cost,—though the cost was as light as her mother could make it—she would not consent to be placed where Imogen had wished to place her. Let it be so, then, let it end on this note of seeming harmony and of silent discord; it was her mother's act, not her own. Truth was in her and had made once more its appeal; once more deep had called to deep only to find shallowness. For spiritual shallowness there must be where an appeal such as hers could be so misunderstood and so rejected.

She was angry, sore, vindictive, though her sharp insight did not reach so far as to tell her this; it did, however, tell her that she was wounded to the quick. But the final refuge was in the thought that she was soon to leave such judgments and such loves behind her for ever.



XXX

It was on a late October day that Jack Pennington rode over the hills to Valerie's summer home.

Two months were gone since Imogen's reporter-haunted nuptials had been celebrated in the bland little country church that raised its white steeple from the woodlands. Jack had been present at them; decency had made that necessary, and a certain grimness in his aspect was easily to be interpreted in a dismal, defeated rival. It was as such, he knew, that he was seen there.

It had been a funny wedding,—to apply none of the other terms that lay deeper in him. In watching it from the white-wreathed chancel he had thought of Valerie's summing-up: "Imogen is one of the people who make the world go round." The world in every phase had been there, from the British ambassador and the Langleys to the East Side club girls—brought up from New York in the special train—and a flourishing consignment of cripples and nurses. Here and there in her path Imogen might meet the blankness of a Miss Bocock, the irony of a Mrs. Wake, a disillusion like Mary's, an insight like his own; but the great world, in its aspect of power and simplicity, would be with her always. He had realized as never before Imogen's capacity, when he saw the cohorts of her friends and followers overflow the church.

She had been a fitting center to it all; though the center, for Jack, was Valerie, exquisite, mildly radiant, not a hint on her of dispossession or of doom; but Imogen, white and rapt and grave, had looked almost as wonderful as on the day when she had first dawned upon Sir Basil's vision.

Jack, watching her uplifted profile as she stood at the altar-rail, found himself trivially, spitefully, irrelevantly murmuring:—"Her nose is too small." And yet she looked more than ever like a Botticelli Madonna.

Rose and Eddy were to be married that winter in New York, a gigantic opportunity for the newspapers, for already half the world seemed trooping to the festivities. Afterward, with old-fashioned Americanism, they would live in quite a little house and try to forget about Rose's fortune until Eddy made his.

Valerie was to have none of the bother of this wedding. Mrs. Packer, a mournful, jeweled, faded little beauty, was well fitted to cope with such emergencies. Her secretaries sat already with pens poised.

Imogen's wedding had kept her mother working like a galley-slave, so Rose told Jack, with the familiarity that was now justifiable in one who was almost of the family, and that Eddy had told her, with much disgust of demeanor, that its financing had eaten pretty deeply into his mother's shrunken means. Rose made no open denunciation; she, no more than anyone else, could guess from Jack's silence what his feeling about Imogen might really be. But she was sure that he was well over her, and that, above all, he was one of the elect who saw Mrs. Upton; she could allow herself a musing survey of all that the mother had done for the daughter, adding, and it was really with a wish for strict justice: "Of course Imogen never had any idea of money, and she'll never realize what she cost." In another and a deeper sense it might be that that was the kindest as well as the truest thing to say of Imogen.

Since the wedding he knew that Valerie had been quietly at the little house among the hills, alone for the most part, though Mrs. Wake was often with her and the Pakenhams had paid her a visit on their way back to England. Now Mrs. Wake was gone back to New York, and her own departure was to take place in a few days. Jack, spending a week-end with friends not beyond riding distance, felt that he must see her again in the surroundings where he had come to know her so well and to know himself as so changed.

He rode over the crests of hills in the flaming, aromatic woods. The fallen leaves paved his way with gold. In the deep distances, before him a still, blue haze, like the bloom on ripe grape-clusters, lay over the purples of the lower ranges. Above, about, before him was the blue sky of the wonderful American "fall," high, clear, crystalline. The air was like an elixir. Jack's eyes were for all this beauty,—"the vast, unconscious scenery of my land," the line that drifted in his thoughts,—his own consciousness, taken up into his contemplation, seeming as vast and as unperplexed. But under his calm, his happy sadness, that, too, seemed a part of the day, ran, like the inner echo to the air's intoxication, a stream of deep, still excitement.

He did not think directly of Valerie, but vague pictures passed, phantom-like, before his mind. He saw her in her garden, gathering late flowers; he saw her reading under the fringe of vine-leaves and tendrils; he saw her again in the wintry New York of snow, sunlight, white, gold and blue, or smiling down from the high-decked steamer against a sky of frosty rose; he saw her on all possible and adequate backgrounds of the land he so loved. But,—oh, it was here that the under-current, the stream of excitement seemed to rise, foaming, circling, submerging him, choking him, with tides of grief and desolation,—seeing her, too, in that land she loved;—not in the Surrey garden, no, no,—that was shut to her for ever;—but in some other, some distant garden, high-walled, the pale gold and gray of an autumnal sunset over its purpling bricks, or on a flower-dappled common in spring, or in spring woods filled with wild hyacinths and primroses. How he could see her, place her, over there, far, far away, from his country—and from him.

It was, after the last sharp trot, the last leisurely uphill canter, on the bordering, leaf-strewn grass of the winding road, where the white walls and gray roof of the little house showed among the trees, that all the undercurrent seemed to center in a knot of suffocating expectancy and pain.

And Valerie, while Jack so rode, so approached her, was fulfilling one of his visions. She had spent the afternoon in her garden, digging, planting, "messing" as she expressed it, very happily among her borders, where late flowers, purple and white and gold, still bloomed. She was planning all sorts of things for her garden, a row of double-cherry-trees to stand at the edges of the woods and be symbols of paradise in spring, with their deep upon deep of miraculous white. Little almond-trees, too, frail sprays of pink on a spring sky, and quince-trees that would show in autumn among ample foliage the pale gold of their softly-furred fruit. She wanted spring flowers to run back far into the woods, the climbing roses and honeysuckle to make summer delicious among the vines of the veranda. The afternoon, full of such projects, passed pleasantly, and when she came in and dressed for her solitary tea, she felt pleasantly tired. She walked up and down the drawing-room, its white walls warm with the reflections of outer sunlight, listening vaguely to the long trail of her black tea-gown behind her, looking vaguely from the open windows at the purple distances set in their nearer waves of flame.

At the end of the room, before the austere little mantelpiece, she paused presently to look at herself in the austere little mirror with its compartments of old gilt; at herself, the illuminated white of the room behind her reflection. A narrow crystal vase mirrored itself beside her leaning arm, and its one tall rose, set among green leaves and russet stems and thorns, spread depths of color near her cheek. Valerie's eyes went from her face to the rose. The rose was fresh, glowing, perfect. Her face, lovely still, was faded.

She stood there, leaning beside the flower, the fingers of her supporting hand sunken deep in the chestnut masses of her hair, and noted, gravely, earnestly, the delicate signs and seals of stealing age.

Never, never again would her face be like the rose, young, fresh, perfect. And she herself was no longer young; in her heart she knew the stillness, the droop, the peace—almost the peace—of softly-falling petals.

How young she had been, how lovely, how full of sweetness. That was the thought that pierced her suddenly, the thought of wasted sweetness, unrecorded beauty, unnoted, unloved, all to go, to pass away for ever. It seemed hardly for herself she grieved, but for the doom of all youth and loveliness; for the fleeting, the impermanence of all life. The vision of herself passed to a vision of the other roses, the drooping, the doomed, scattering their petals in the chill breeze of coming winter.

"Poor things," was her thought,—her own self-pity had part only in its inclusiveness,—"summer is over for all of us."

And with the thought, girlishly, still girlishly, she hid her face upon her arms as she stood there, murmuring:—"Ah, I hate, I hate getting old."

A step at the door roused her. She turned to see Jack entering.

Jack looked very nice in the tans and russets of his riding-tweeds and gaiters. The chill air had brought a clear color to his cheeks; the pale gold of his hair,—one unruly lock, as usual, over-long, lying across his forehead,—shone like sunlight; his gray eyes looked as deep and limpid as a mountain pool.

Valerie was very, very glad to see him. He embodied the elixir, the color, the freshness of the world to-day: and oh how young—how young—how fortunately, beautifully young he looked;—that was the thought that met him from the contrast of the mirror.

She gave him her hands in welcome, and they sat down near a window where the sunlight fell upon them and the breeze blew in upon them, she on a little sofa, among chintz cushions, he on a low chair beside her; and while they talked, that excitement, that pain and expectancy grew in Jack.

The summer was over and, soon, it must be, she would go. With a wave of sadness that sucked him back and swept him forward in a long, sure ache, came the knowledge, deeper than before, of his own desolation. But, sitting there beside her in the October sunlight; feeling, with the instinct, so quick, so sensitive in him, that it was in sadness he had found her, the desolation wasn't so much for himself as for her, what she represented and stood for. He, too, seeing her face with the blooming rose beside it, had known her piercing thought.

She was going; but in other senses, too. She had begun to go; and all the sacrifices, the relinquishments, the acceptances of the summer, were the first steps of departure. She had done with things and he, who had not yet done with them, was left behind. Already the signs of distance were upon her—he saw them as she had seen them—her distance from the world of youth, of hope, of effort.

A thin veil, like the sad-sweet haze over the purpling hills, seemed to waver between them; the veil that, for all its melting elusiveness, parts implacably one generation from another. Its dimness seemed to rest on her bright hair and to hover in her bright eyes; to soften, as with a faint melancholy, the brightness of her smile. And it was as if he saw her, with a little sigh, unclasp her hands, that had clung to what she fancied to be still her share of life,—unclasp her hands, look round her with a slight amaze at the changed season where she found herself, and, after the soundless pause of recognition, bend her head consentingly to the quiet, obliterating snows of age. And once more his own change, his own initiation to subtler standards, was marked by the fact that when the old, ethical self, still over-glib with its assurances, tried to urge upon him that all was for the best in a wonderful world, ventured to murmur an axiom or so as to the grace, the dignity, the added spiritual significance of old age, the new self, awakened to tragedy, turned angry eyes upon that vision of the rose in the devastated garden, and once more muttered, in silence:—"Damn!"

They had talked of the past and of the coming marriage, very superficially, in their outer aspects; they had talked of his summer wanderings and of the Pakenhams' visit to Vermont. She had given him tea and she had told him of her plans for the winter;—she had given up the New York house, and had taken a little flat near Mrs. Wake's, that she was going to move to in a few days from now. And Jack said at last, feeling that with the words he dived from shallows into deeps:—"And—when are you going back?—back to England?"