"Going back?"—She repeated his words with vagueness.

"Yes; to where you've always liked to live."

"Yes; I liked living there," said Valerie, still with vagueness in her contemplative "yes."

"And still like it."

She seemed to consider. "Things have changed, you know. It was change I used to want, I looked for it, perhaps mistakenly. Now it has come of itself. And I feel a great unwillingness to move on again."

The poignant vision of something bruised, dimmed, listless, was with him, and it was odd to hear himself urging:—"But in the meantime, you, too, have changed. The whole thing over here, the thing we so care for, isn't yours. You don't really care about it much, if at all. It doesn't really please you. It gives you with effort what you can get with ease, over there, and it must jar on you, often. We are young; crude; all the over-obvious things that are always said of us; our enthusiasms are too facile; our standards of achievement, in the things you care for, rather second-rate; oh, you know well enough what I mean. We are not crystallized yet into a shape that's really comfortable for a person like you:—perhaps we never shall be; perhaps I hope that we never shall be. So why shouldn't you go to a place where you can have all the things you like?"

She listened to him in silence, with, at the end, a slight smile for the exactitude of his: "Perhaps I hope that we never shall be;"—and she paused now as if his portrayal of her own wants required consideration. "Perhaps," she said at length, "perhaps I never cared so much about all those things."

"Oh, but you do," said Jack with conviction.

"You mean, I suppose, all the things people over here go away so much to get. No, I don't think so. It was never really that. I don't think"—and she seemed to be thinking it out for herself as well as for him—"that I've ever been so conscious of standards—crystallizations—the relative values and forms of things. What I wanted was freedom. Not that I was ever oppressed or ill-treated, far from it;—but I was too—uncomfortable. I was like a bird forced to live like a fish, or perhaps we had better say, like a fish forced to live like a bird. That was why I went. I couldn't breathe. And, yes, I like the life over there. It's very easy and gliding; it protects you from jars; it gives you beauty for the asking;—here we have to make it as a rule. I like the people, too, and their unconsciousness. One likes us, you know, Jack, for what is conscious in us—and it's so much that there's hardly a bit of us that isn't conscious. We know our way all over ourselves, as it were, and can put all of ourselves into the window if we want someone else to know us. One often likes them for their unconsciousness, for all the things behind the window, all the things they know nothing at all about, the things that are instinctive, background things. It makes a more peaceful feeling. One can wander about dim rooms, as it were, and rest in them; one doesn't have to recognize, and respond so much. Yes, I shall miss it all, in a great many ways. But I like it here, too. For one thing, there is a great deal more to do."

Jack, in some bewilderment, was grasping at clues. One was that, as he had long ago learned of her, she was incapable of phrases, even when they were sincere, incapable of dramatizing herself, even if her situation lent itself to tragic interpretations. Uncomfortable?—was that all that she found to say of her life, her suffocating life, among the fishes? She could put it aside with that. And as for the rest, he realized suddenly, with a new illumination—at what a late date it was for him to reach it; he, who had thought that he knew her so well!—that she cared less, in reality, for all those "things" lacking in the life of her native land than the bulk of her conscious, anxious countrymen. Cared not enough, his old self of judgment and moral appraisement would have pronounced. She wasn't intellectual, nor was she esthetic; that was the funny part of it, about a person whose whole being diffused a sense of completeness that was like a perfume. Art, culture, a complicated social life, being on the top of things, as it were, were not the objects of her concentration. It was indeed her indifference to them, her independence of them, that made her, for his wider consciousness, oddly un-American.

In the midst of bewilderment and illumination one thing stood clear, a trembling joy; he had to make assurance doubly sure. "If you are not going away, what will you do?"

"I don't know";—he would, once, have rebuked the smile with which she said it as indolent;—"I wasn't thinking of anything definite, for myself. I'll watch other people do—you, for instance, Jack. I shall spend most of my time here in the country; New York is so expensive; I shall garden—wait till you see what I make of this in a few years' time; I shall look after Rose and Eddy—at a tactful distance."

"But your wider life? Your many friends, over there?" Jack still protested, fearing that he saw more clearly than she to what a widow with a tiny, crippled fortune was consigning herself in this country of the young and striving. "You need gaiety, brilliancy, big, bright vistas." It was strange to hear himself urging his thought for her against that inner throb. Again she gave him her grave, brief smile. "You forget, Jack, that I'm—cured. I'm quite old enough not to mind giving up."

The warm, consoling assurance was with him, of her presence near his life; but under it the excitement, the pain, had so risen that he wondered if she did not read them in his eyes.

The evening was growing late; the sky had turned to a pale, translucent gold, streaked, over the horizon, by thin, cold, lilac-colored clouds. He must go, leaving her there, alone, and, in so doing, he would leave something else behind him forever. For it was now, as the veil fell upon her, as the evening fell over the wide earth, it was now or never that he could receive the last illumination. He hardly saw clearly what that might be; it wavered like a hovering light behind the mist.

He rose and walked up and down the room a little; pausing to look from the windows at the golden sky; pausing to look, now and then, at her, sitting there in her long, black dress, vaguely shadowed on the outer light, smiling, tranquil, yet sad, so sad.

"So, our summer is at an end," he said, turning at last from the window. "The air has a frosty tang already. I suppose I must be off. I shall not see you again until New York. I'm glad—I'm glad that you are to be there"; and now he stammered suddenly, a little—"more glad than I can say."

"Thanks, Jack," she answered, her eyes fondly dwelling on him. "You are one of the things I would not like to leave."

Again he walked up and down, and seemed to hear the steady flow of that still, deep excitement. Why, above it, should he say silly, meaningless words, that were like a bridge thrown over it to lead him from her?

"I want to tell you one thing, just one, before I go," he said. He knew that, with his sudden resolution, his voice had changed and, to quiet himself, he stood before her and put both hands on the back of a chair that was between them. He couldn't go on building that bridge. He must dare something, even if something else he must not dare—unless, unless she let him. "I must tell you that you are the most enchanting person I have ever known."

She looked at him quietly, though she was startled, not quite understanding, and she said a little sadly: "Only that, Jack?"

"Yes, only that, for you, because you don't need the trite, obvious labels that one affixes to other people. You don't need me to say that you are good or true or brave;—it's like a delicate seal that comprises and expresses everything,—the trite things and the strange, lovely things—when I say that you are enchanting." He held his mind, so conscious, under the words, of what he must not say, to the intellectual preoccupation of making her see, at all events, just what the words he could say meant.

But as his voice rang, tense, vibrant as a tightened cord in the still room, as his eyes sank into hers, Valerie felt in her own dying youth the sudden echo to all he dared not say.

She had never seen, quick as she was to see the meaning behind words and looks. She suspected that he, also, had never seen it clearly till now.

Other claims had dropped from them; the world was gone; they were alone, his eyes on hers; and between them was the magic of life.

Yes, she had it still, the gift, the compelling charm. His eyes in their young strength and fear and adoration called to her life, and with a touch, a look, she could bring to it this renewal and this solace. And, behind her sorrow, her veil, her relinquishment, Valerie was deeply thrilled.

The thrill went through her, but even while she knew it, it hardly moved her. No; the relinquishment had been too deep. She had lost forever, in losing the other. That had been to turn her back on life, or, rather, to see it turn its back on her, forever. Not without an ugly crash of inner, twisted discord could she step once more from the place of snow, or hold out her hand to love.

All his life was before him, but for her—; for her it was finished. And as she mastered the thrill, as she turned from the vision of what his eyes besought and promised, a flow of pity, pity for his youth and pain and for all the long way he was yet to go, filled her, bringing peace, even while the sweetness of the unsought, undreamed of offering made her smile again, a trembling smile.

"Dear Jack, thank you," she said.

Suddenly, before her smile, her look, he flushed deeply, taking from her eyes what his own full meaning had been. Already it was in the past, the still-born hope; it was dead before he gazed upon it; but he must hear the death-warrant from her lips, it was not enough to see it, so gentle, so pitiful, so loving, in her eyes, and he heard himself stammering:—"You— you haven't anything else you can say to me?"

She had found her answer in a moment, and now indeed she was at the helm, steering them both past white shores, set in such depths of magical blue, white shores where sirens sang. Never could they land there, never listen to the song. And already she seemed to hear it, as if from a far distance, ringing, sharp and strange with the swiftness of their flight, as she replied: "Nothing else, dear Jack, except that I wish you were my son."

The enchanted island had sunk below the horizon. They were landed, and on the safest, sanest, shores. She knew that she had achieved her own place, and that from it, secure, above him, the veil between them, her smile was the smile of motherhood. To smile so was to put before him finally the fact that her enchantment contradicted and helplessly lured him to forget. She would never forget it now, nor could he. She was Imogen's mother, and she was old enough to be his.

From her smile, her eyes, common-sense flooded Jack, kind, yet stinging, too, savoring of a rescue from some hidden danger,—not his—not his—his was none of the common-sense,—but hers. He might had she let him, have so dislocated her life.

He was scarlet, stammering. He knew that he hid nothing from her now, that he didn't want or need to hide anything. Those benign, maternal eyes would understand. And he smiled, too, but also with a trembling smile, as he reached out to her hand, holding it tightly and saying, gazing at her:—"I love you so."

Her hand held his, in farewell now, but her look up at him promised everything, everything for the future,—except the one now shrouded thing. "And I love you, dear Jack," she said. "You have taken the place of—almost everything."

And then, for she saw the tears in his eyes, and knew that his heart was bleeding, not for himself alone, she rose and took his head between her hands, and, like a mother, kissed him above his eyes.

* * * * *

When he had left her,—and they said no further word,—Valerie did not again relapse into a despondent attitude.

The sky was like a deep rose, soft, dim, dying, and the color of the afterglow filled the room.

Standing at the window she breathed in the keen, sweet air, and looked from the dying day down to her garden.

She had watched Jack disappear among the trees, waving to him, and her heart followed his aching heart with comprehending pity. But, from her conquest of the thrill, a clear, contemplative insight was left with her, so that, looking out over the lives she was to watch, she felt herself, for all her sadness, a merry, if a serious fate, mingling the threads of others' fortunes with a benignant hand.

Imogen's threads had snapped off very sharply. Imogen would be the better pleased that the Surrey cottage should know her no more. The pang for the wrecking of all maternal hope passed strangely into a deeper pang for all that the Surrey cottage stood for in her life, all the things that she had left to come to Imogen. She remembered. And, for a moment, the old vortex of whirling anguish almost engulfed her. Only long years could deaden the pang of that parting. She would not dwell on that. Eddy and Rose; to turn to them was to feel almost gay. Jack and Mary;—yes, on these last names her thoughts lingered and her gaze for them held tender presages. That must be.

Jack would not know how her maternal solicitude was to encompass him and mold his way. If the benignant fate saw clearly, Jack and Mary were to marry. Strange that it should not be from anything of her own that the deepest call upon her fostering tenderness came. She wasn't needed by anything of her own. This was the tragedy of her life that, more than youth passed and love renounced, seemed to drift snows upon her.

But, beyond the personal pang and failure, she could look down at her garden and out at the quiet, evening vistas. The very flowers seemed to smile gentle promises to her, and to murmur that, after all, rather than bitterness, failure was to bring humble peace.

Leaning her head against the window, where in the breeze the curtain softly flapped, she looked out at the tranquil twilight, contented to be sad.

"I will have friends with me," she said to herself; "I will garden and learn a new language. I will read a great many books." And, with a sense of happy daring, not rebuked by reason, she could add, thinking of the mingled threads:—"I will have them often here to stay with me, and, perhaps, they will let me spoil the babies."

THE END