“Therewasone, which was found after poor Darrow’s death. In it he gave Dick leave to use his design for the competition. Dick says the design is wonderful—it would give him just what he needs.”
Miss Verney sat listening raptly, with a rush of colour that suffused her like light.
“But when was this? Where was the letter found? He never said a word of it!” she exclaimed.
“The letter was found on the day of Darrow’s death.”
“But I don’t understand! Why has he never told me? Why should he seem so hopeless?” She turned an ignorant appealing face on Mrs. Peyton. It was prodigious, but it was true—she felt nothing, saw nothing, but the crude fact of the opportunity.
Mrs. Peyton’s voice trembled with the completeness of her triumph. “I suppose his reason for not speaking is that he has scruples.”
“Scruples?”
“He feels that to use the design would be dishonest.”
Miss Verney’s eyes fixed themselves on her in a commiserating stare. “Dishonest? When the poor man wished it himself? When it was his last request? When the letter is there to prove it? Why, the design belongs to your son! No one else had any right to it.”
“But Dick’s right does not extend to passing it off as his own—at least that is his feeling, I believe. If he won the competition he would be winning it on false pretenses.”
“Why should you call them false pretenses? His design might have been better than Darrow’s if he had had time to carry it out. It seems to me that Mr. Darrow must have felt this—must have felt that he owed his friend some compensation for the time he took from him. I can imagine nothing more natural than his wishing to make this return for your son’s sacrifice.”
She positively glowed with the force of her conviction, and Mrs. Peyton, for a strange instant, felt her own resistance wavering. She herself had never considered the question in that light—the light of Darrow’s viewing his gift as a justifiable compensation. But the glimpse she caught of it drove her shuddering behind her retrenchments.
“That argument,” she said coldly, “would naturally be more convincing to Darrow than to my son.”
Miss Verney glanced up, struck by the change in Mrs. Peyton’s voice.
“Ah, then you agree with him? You think itwouldbe dishonest?”
Mrs. Peyton saw that she had slipped into self-betrayal. “My son and I have not spoken of the matter,” she said evasively. She caught the flash of relief in Miss Verney’s face.
“You haven’t spoken? Then how do you know how he feels about it?”
“I only judge from—well, perhaps from his not speaking.”
The girl drew a deep breath. “I see,” she murmured. “That is the very reason that prevents his speaking.”
“The reason?”
“Your knowing what he thinks—and his knowing that you know.”
Mrs. Peyton was startled at her subtlety. “I assure you,” she said, rising, “that I have done nothing to influence him.”
The girl gazed at her musingly. “No,” she said with a faint smile, “nothing except to read his thoughts.”
Mrs. Peyton reached home in the state of exhaustion which follows on a physical struggle. It seemed to her as though her talk with Clemence Verney had been an actual combat, a measuring of wrist and eye. For a moment she was frightened at what she had done—she felt as though she had betrayed her son to the enemy. But before long she regained her moral balance, and saw that she had merely shifted the conflict to the ground on which it could best be fought out—since the prize fought for was the natural battlefield. The reaction brought with it a sense of helplessness, a realization that she had let the issue pass out of her hold; but since, in the last analysis, it had never lain there, since it was above all needful that the determining touch should be given by any hand but hers, she presently found courage to subside into inaction. She had done all she could—even more, perhaps, than prudence warranted—and now she could but await passively the working of the forces she had set in motion.
For two days after her talk with Miss Verney she saw little of Dick. He went early to his office and came back late. He seemed less tired, more self-possessed, than during the first days after Darrow’s death; but there was a new inscrutableness in his manner, a note of reserve, of resistance almost, as though he had barricaded himself against her conjectures. She had been struck by Miss Verney’s reply to the anxious asseveration that she had done nothing to influence Dick—“Nothing,” the girl had answered, “except to read his thoughts.” Mrs. Peyton shrank from this detection of a tacit interference with her son’s liberty of action. She longed—how passionately he would never know—to stand apart from him in this struggle between his two destinies, and it was almost a relief that he on his side should hold aloof, should, for the first time in their relation, seem to feel her tenderness as an intrusion.
Only four days remained before the date fixed for the sending in of the designs, and still Dick had not referred to his work. Of Darrow, also, he had made no mention. His mother longed to know if he had spoken to Clemence Verney—or rather if the girl had forced his confidence. Mrs. Peyton was almost certain that Miss Verney would not remain silent—there were times when Dick’s renewed application to his work seemed an earnest of her having spoken, and spoken convincingly. At the thought Kate’s heart grew chill. What if her experiment should succeed in a sense she had not intended? If the girl should reconcile Dick to his weakness, should pluck the sting from his temptation? In this round of uncertainties the mother revolved for two interminable days; but the second evening brought an answer to her question.
Dick, returning earlier than usual from the office, had found, on the hall-table, a note which, since morning, had been under his mother’s observation. The envelope, fashionable in tint and texture, was addressed in a rapid staccato hand which seemed the very imprint of Miss Verney’s utterance. Mrs. Peyton did not know the girl’s writing; but such notes had of late lain often enough on the hall-table to make their attribution easy. This communication Dick, as his mother poured his tea, looked over with a face of shifting lights; then he folded it into his note-case, and said, with a glance at his watch: “If you haven’t asked any one for this evening I think I’ll dine out.”
“Do, dear; the change will be good for you,” his mother assented.
He made no answer, but sat leaning back, his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes fixed on the fire. Every line of his body expressed a profound physical lassitude, but the face remained alert and guarded. Mrs. Peyton, in silence, was busying herself with the details of the tea-making, when suddenly, inexplicably, a question forced itself to her lips.
“And your work—?” she said, strangely hearing herself speak.
“My work—?” He sat up, on the defensive almost, but without a tremor of the guarded face.
“You’re getting on well? You’ve made up for lost time?”
“Oh, yes: things are going better.” He rose, with another glance at his watch. “Time to dress,” he said, nodding to her as he turned to the door.
It was an hour later, during her own solitary dinner, that a ring at the door was followed by the parlour-maid’s announcement that Mr. Gill was there from the office. In the hall, in fact, Kate found her son’s partner, who explained apologetically that he had understood Peyton was dining at home, and had come to consult him about a difficulty which had arisen since he had left the office. On hearing that Dick was out, and that his mother did not know where he had gone, Mr. Gill’s perplexity became so manifest that Mrs. Peyton, after a moment, said hesitatingly: “He may be at a friend’s house; I could give you the address.”
The architect caught up his hat. “Thank you; I’ll have a try for him.”
Mrs. Peyton hesitated again. “Perhaps,” she suggested, “it would be better to telephone.”
She led the way into the little study behind the drawing-room, where a telephone stood on the writing-table. The folding doors between the two rooms were open: should she close them as she passed back into the drawing-room? On the threshold she wavered an instant; then she walked on and took her usual seat by the fire.
Gill, meanwhile, at the telephone, had “rung up” the Verney house, and inquired if his partner were dining there. The reply was evidently affirmative; and a moment later Kate knew that he was in communication with her son. She sat motionless, her hands clasped on the arms of her chair, her head erect, in an attitude of avowed attention. If she listened she would listen openly: there should be no suspicion of eavesdropping. Gill, engrossed in his message, was probably hardly conscious of her presence; but if he turned his head he should at least have no difficulty in seeing her, and in being aware that she could hear what he said. Gill, however, as she was quick to remember, was doubtless ignorant of any need for secrecy in his communication to Dick. He had often heard the affairs of the office discussed openly before Mrs. Peyton, had been led to regard her as familiar with all the details of her son’s work. He talked on unconcernedly, and she listened.
Ten minutes later, when he rose to go, she knew all that she had wanted to find out. Long familiarity with the technicalities of her son’s profession made it easy for her to translate the stenographic jargon of the office. She could lengthen out all Gill’s abbreviations, interpret all his allusions, and reconstruct Dick’s answers from the questions addressed to him. And when the door closed on the architect she was left face to face with the fact that her son, unknown to any one but herself, was using Darrow’s drawings to complete his work.
Mrs. Peyton, left alone, found it easier to continue her vigil by the drawing-room fire than to carry up to the darkness and silence of her own room the truth she had been at such pains to acquire. She had no thought of sitting up for Dick. Doubtless, his dinner over, he would rejoin Gill at the office, and prolong through, the night the task in which she now knew him to be engaged. But it was less lonely by the fire than in the wide-eyed darkness which awaited her upstairs. A mortal loneliness enveloped her. She felt as though she had fallen by the way, spent and broken in a struggle of which even its object had been unconscious. She had tried to deflect the natural course of events, she had sacrificed her personal happiness to a fantastic ideal of duty, and it was her punishment to be left alone with her failure, outside the normal current of human strivings and regrets.
She had no wish to see her son just then: she would have preferred to let the inner tumult subside, to repossess herself in this new adjustment to life, before meeting his eyes again. But as she sat there, far adrift on her misery, she was aroused by the turning of his key in the latch. She started up, her heart sounding a retreat, but her faculties too dispersed to obey it; and while she stood wavering, the door opened and he was in the room.
In the room, and with face illumined: a Dick she had not seen since the strain of the contest had cast its shade on him. Now he shone as in a sunrise of victory, holding out exultant hands from which she hung back instinctively.
“Mother! I knew you’d be waiting for me!” He had her on his breast now, and his kisses were in her hair. “I’ve always said you knew everything that was happening to me, and now you’ve guessed that I wanted you to-night.”
She was struggling faintly against the dear endearments. “Whathashappened?” she murmured, drawing back for a dazzled look at him.
He had drawn her to the sofa, had dropped beside her, regaining his hold of her in the boyish need that his happiness should be touched and handled.
“My engagement has happened!” he cried out to her. “You stupid dear, do you need to be told?”
She had indeed needed to be told: the surprise was complete and overwhelming. She sat silent under it, her hands trembling in his, till the blood mounted to his face and she felt his confident grasp relax.
“You didn’t guess it, then?” he exclaimed, starting up and moving away from her.
“No; I didn’t guess it,” she confessed in a dead-level voice.
He stood above her, half challenging, half defensive. “And you haven’t a word to say to me? Mother!” he adjured her.
She rose too, putting her arms about him with a kiss. “Dick! Dear Dick!” she murmured.
“She imagines you don’t like her; she says she’s always felt it. And yet she owns you’ve been delightful, that you’ve tried to make friends with her. And I thought you knew how much it would mean to me, just now, to have this uncertainty over, and that you’d actually been trying to help me, to put in a good word for me. I thought it was you who had made her decide.”
“I?”
“By your talk with her the other day. She told me of your talk with her.”
His mother’s hands slipped from his shoulders and she sank back into her seat. She felt the cruelty of her silence, but only an inarticulate murmur found a way to her lips. Before speaking she must clear a space in the suffocating rush of her sensations. For the moment she could only repeat inwardly that Clemence Verney had yielded before the final test, and that she herself was somehow responsible for this fresh entanglement of fate. For she saw in a flash how the coils of circumstance had tightened; and as her mind cleared it was filled with the perception that this, precisely, was what the girl intended, that this was why she had conferred the crown before the victory. By pledging herself to Dick she had secured his pledge in return: had put him on his honour in a cynical inversion of the term. Kate saw the succession of events spread out before her like a map, and the astuteness of the girl’s policy frightened her. Miss Verney had conducted the campaign like a strategist. She had frankly owned that her interest in Dick’s future depended on his capacity for success, and in order to key him up to his first achievement she had given him a foretaste of its results.
So much was almost immediately clear to Mrs. Peyton; but in a moment her inferences had carried her a point farther. For it was now plain to her that Miss Verney had not risked so much without first trying to gain her point at less cost: that if she had had to give herself as a prize, it was because no other bribe had been sufficient. This then, as the mother saw with a throb of hope, meant that Dick, who since Darrow’s death had held to his purpose unwaveringly, had been deflected from it by the first hint of Clemence Verney’s connivance. Kate had not miscalculated: things had happened as she had foreseen. In the light of the girl’s approval his act had taken an odious look. He had recoiled from it, and it was to revive his flagging courage that she had had to promise herself, to take him in the meshes of her surrender.
Kate, looking up, saw above her the young perplexity of her boy’s face, the suspended happiness waiting to brim over. With a fresh touch of misery she said to herself that this was his hour, his one irrecoverable moment, and that she was darkening it by her silence. Her memory went back to the same hour in her own life: she could feel its heat in her pulses still. What right had she to stand in Dick’s light? Who was she to decide between his code and hers? She put out her hand and drew him down to her.
“She’ll be the making of me, you know, mother,” he said, as they leaned together. “She’ll put new life in me—she’ll help me get my second wind. Her talk is like a fresh breeze blowing away the fog in my head. I never knew any one who saw so straight to the heart of things, who had such a grip on values. She goes straight up to life and catches hold of it, and you simply can’t make her let go.”
He got up and walked the length of the room; then he came back and stood smiling above his mother.
“You know you and I are rather complicated people,” he said. “We’re always walking around things to get new views of them—we’re always rearranging the furniture. And somehow she simplifies life so tremendously.” He dropped down beside her with a deprecating laugh. “Not that I mean, dear, that it hasn’t been good for me to argue things out with myself, as you’ve taught me to—only the man who stops to talk is apt to get shoved aside nowadays, and I don’t believe Milton’s archangels would have had much success in active business.”
He had begun in a strain of easy confidence, but as he went on she detected an effort to hold the note, she felt that his words were being poured out in a vain attempt to fill the silence which was deepening between them. She longed, in her turn, to pour something into that menacing void, to bridge it with a reconciling word or look; but her soul hung back, and she had to take refuge in a vague murmur of tenderness.
“My boy! My boy!” she repeated; and he sat beside her without speaking, their hand-clasp alone spanning the distance which had widened between their thoughts.
The engagement, as Kate subsequently learned, was not to be made known till later. Miss Verney had even stipulated that for the present there should be no recognition of it in her own family or in Dick’s. She did not wish to interfere with his final work for the competition, and had made him promise, as he laughingly owned, that he would not see her again till the drawings were sent in. His mother noticed that he made no other allusion to his work; but when he bade her good-night he added that he might not see her the next morning, as he had to go to the office early. She took this as a hint that he wished to be left alone, and kept her room the next day till the closing door told her that he was out of the house.
She herself had waked early, and it seemed to her that the day was already old when she came downstairs. Never had the house appeared so empty. Even in Dick’s longest absences something of his presence had always hung about the rooms: a fine dust of memories and associations, which wanted only the evocation of her thought to float into a palpable semblance of him. But now he seemed to have taken himself quite away, to have broken every fibre by which their lives had hung together. Where the sense of him had been there was only a deeper emptiness: she felt as if a strange man had gone out of her house.
She wandered from room to room, aimlessly, trying to adjust herself to their solitude. She had known such loneliness before, in the years when most women’s hearts are fullest; but that was long ago, and the solitude had after all been less complete, because of the sense that it might still be filled. Her son had come: her life had brimmed over; but now the tide ebbed again, and she was left gazing over a bare stretch of wasted years. Wasted! There was the mortal pang, the stroke from which there was no healing. Her faith and hope had been marsh-lights luring her to the wilderness, her love a vain edifice reared on shifting ground.
In her round of the rooms she came at last to Dick’s study upstairs. It was full of his boyhood: she could trace the history of his past in its quaint relics and survivals, in the school-books lingering on his crowded shelves, the school-photographs and college-trophies hung among his later treasures. All his successes and failures, his exaltations and inconsistencies, were recorded in the warm huddled heterogeneous room. Everywhere she saw the touch of her own hand, the vestiges of her own steps. It was she alone who held the clue to the labyrinth, who could thread a way through the confusions and contradictions of his past; and her soul rejected the thought that his future could ever escape from her. She dropped down into his shabby college armchair and hid her face in the papers on his desk.
The day dwelt in her memory as a long stretch of aimless hours: blind alleys of time that led up to a dead wall of inaction.
Toward afternoon she remembered that she had promised to dine out and go to the opera. At first she felt that the contact of life would be unendurable; then she shrank from shutting herself up with her misery. In the end she let herself drift passively on the current of events, going through the mechanical routine of the day without much consciousness of what was happening.
At twilight, as she sat in the drawing-room, the evening paper was brought in, and in glancing over it her eye fell on a paragraph which seemed printed in more vivid type than the rest. It was headed,The New Museum of Sculpture, and underneath she read: “The artists and architects selected to pass on the competitive designs for the new Museum will begin their sittings on Monday, and to-morrow is the last day on which designs may be sent in to the committee. Great interest is felt in the competition, as the conspicuous site chosen for the new building, and the exceptionally large sum voted by the city for its erection, offer an unusual field for the display of architectural ability.”
She leaned back, closing her eyes. It was as though a clock had struck, loud and inexorably, marking off some irrecoverable hour. She was seized by a sudden longing to seek Dick out, to fall on her knees and plead with him: it was one of those physical obsessions against which the body has to stiffen its muscles as well as the mind its thoughts. Once she even sprang up to ring for a cab; but she sank back again, breathing as if after a struggle, and gripping the arms of her chair to keep herself down.
“I can only wait for him—only wait for him—” she heard herself say; and the words loosened the sobs in her throat.
At length she went upstairs to dress for dinner. A ghostlike self looked back at her from her toilet-glass: she watched it performing the mechanical gestures of the toilet, dressing her, as it appeared, without help from her actual self. Each little act stood out sharply against the blurred background of her brain: when she spoke to her maid her voice sounded extraordinarily loud. Never had the house been so silent; or, stay—yes, once she had felt the same silence, once when Dick, in his school-days, had been ill of a fever, and she had sat up with him on the decisive night. The silence had been as deep and as terrible then; and as she dressed she had before her the vision of his room, of the cot in which he lay, of his restless head working a hole in the pillow, his face so pinched and alien under the familiar freckles. It might be his death-watch she was keeping: the doctors had warned her to be ready. And in the silence her soul had fought for her boy, her love had hung over him like wings, her abundant useless hateful life had struggled to force itself into his empty veins. And she had succeeded, she had saved him, she had poured her life into him; and in place of the strange child she had watched all night, at daylight she held her own boy to her breast.
That night had once seemed to her the most dreadful of her life; but she knew now that it was one of the agonies which enrich, that the passion thus spent grows fourfold from its ashes. She could not have borne to keep this new vigil alone. She must escape from its sterile misery, must take refuge in other lives till she regained courage to face her own. At the opera, in the illumination of the firstentr’acte, as she gazed about the house, wondering through the numb ache of her wretchedness how others could talk and smile and be indifferent, it seemed to her that all the jarring animation about her was suddenly focussed in the face of Clemence Verney. Miss Verney sat opposite, in the front of a crowded box, a box in which, continually, the black-coated background shifted and renewed itself. Mrs. Peyton felt a throb of anger at the girl’s bright air of unconcern. She forgot that she too was talking, smiling, holding out her hand to newcomers, in a studied mimicry of life, while her real self played out its tragedy behind the scenes. Then it occurred to her that, to Clemence Verney, there was no tragedy in the situation. According to the girl’s calculations, Dick was virtually certain of success; and unsuccess was to her the only conceivable disaster.
All through the opera the sense of that opposing force, that negation of her own beliefs, burned itself into Mrs. Peyton’s consciousness. The space between herself and the girl seemed to vanish, the throng about them to disperse, till they were face to face and alone, enclosed in their mortal enmity. At length the feeling of humiliation and defeat grew unbearable to Mrs. Peyton. The girl seemed to flout her in the insolence of victory, to sit there as the visible symbol of her failure. It was better after all to be at home alone with her thoughts.
As she drove away from the opera she thought of that other vigil which, only a few streets away, Dick was perhaps still keeping. She wondered if his work were over, if the final stroke had been drawn. And as she pictured him there, signing his pact with evil in the loneliness of the conniving night, an uncontrollable impulse possessed her. She must drive by his windows and see if they were still alight. She would not go up to him,—she dared not,—but at least she would pass near to him, would invisibly share his watch and hover on the edge of his thoughts. She lowered the window and called out the address to the coachman.
The tall office-building loomed silent and dark as she approached it; but presently, high up, she caught a light in the familiar windows. Her heart gave a leap, and the light swam on her through tears. The carriage drew up, and for a moment she sat motionless. Then the coachman bent down toward her, and she saw that he was asking if he should drive on. She tried to shape a yes, but her lips refused it, and she shook her head. He continued to lean down perplexedly, and at length, under the interrogation of his attitude, it became impossible to sit still, and she opened the door and stepped out. It was equally impossible to stand on the sidewalk, and her next steps carried her to the door of the building. She groped for the bell and rang it, feeling still dimly accountable to the coachman for some consecutiveness of action, and after a moment the night watchman opened the door, drawing back amazed at the shining apparition which confronted him. Recognizing Mrs. Peyton, whom he had seen about the building by day, he tried to adapt himself to the situation by a vague stammer of apology.
“I came to see if my son is still here,” she faltered.
“Yes, ma’am, he’s here. He’s been here most nights lately till after twelve.”
“And is Mr. Gill with him?”
“No: Mr. Gill he went away just after I come on this evening.”
She glanced up into the cavernous darkness of the stairs.
“Is he alone up there, do you think?”
“Yes, ma’am, I know he’s alone, because I seen his men leaving soon after Mr. Gill.”
Kate lifted her head quickly. “Then I will go up to him,” she said.
The watchman apparently did not think it proper to offer any comment on this unusual proceeding, and a moment later she was fluttering and rustling up through the darkness, like a night-bird hovering among rafters. There were ten flights to climb: at every one her breath failed her, and she had to stand still and press her hands against her heart. Then the weight on her breast lifted, and she went on again, upward and upward, the great dark building dropping away from her, in tier after tier of mute doors and mysterious corridors. At last she reached Dick’s floor, and saw the light shining down the passage from his door. She leaned against the wall, her breath coming short, the silence throbbing in her ears. Even now it was not too late to turn back. She bent over the stairs, letting her eyes plunge into the nether blackness, with the single glimmer of the watchman’s lights in its depths; then she turned and stole toward her son’s door.
There again she paused and listened, trying to catch, through the hum of her pulses, any noise that might come to her from within. But the silence was unbroken—it seemed as though the office must be empty. She pressed her ear to the door, straining for a sound. She knew he never sat long at his work, and it seemed unaccountable that she should not hear him moving about the drawing-board. For a moment she fancied he might be sleeping; but sleep did not come to him readily after prolonged mental effort—she recalled the restless straying of his feet above her head for hours after he returned from his night work in the office.
She began to fear that he might be ill. A nervous trembling seized her, and she laid her hand on the latch, whispering “Dick!”
Her whisper sounded loudly through the silence, but there was no answer, and after a pause she called again. With each call the hush seemed to deepen: it closed in on her, mysterious and impenetrable. Her heart was beating in short frightened leaps: a moment more and she would have cried out. She drew a quick breath and turned the door-handle.
The outer room, Dick’s private office, with its red carpet and easy-chairs, stood in pleasant lamp-lit emptiness. The last time she had entered it, Darrow and Clemence Verney had been there, and she had sat behind the urn observing them. She paused a moment, struck now by a fault sound from beyond; then she slipped noiselessly across the carpet, pushed open the swinging door, and stood on the threshold of the work-room. Here the gas-lights hung a green-shaded circle of brightness over the great draughting-table in the middle of the floor. Table and floor were strewn with a confusion of papers—torn blue-prints and tracings, crumpled sheets of tracing-paper wrenched from the draughting-boards in a sudden fury of destruction; and in the centre of the havoc, his arms stretched across the table and his face hidden in them, sat Dick Peyton.
He did not seem to hear his mother’s approach, and she stood looking at him, her breast tightening with a new fear.
“Dick!” she said, “Dick!—” and he sprang up, staring with dazed eyes. But gradually, as his gaze cleared, a light spread in it, a mounting brightness of recognition.
“You’ve come—you’ve come—” he said, stretching his hands to her; and all at once she had him in her breast as in a shelter.
“You wanted me?” she whispered as she held him.
He looked up at her, tired, breathless, with the white radiance of the runner near the goal.
“Ihadyou, dear!” he said, smiling strangely on her; and her heart gave a great leap of understanding.
Her arms had slipped from his neck, and she stood leaning on him, deep-suffused in the shyness of her discovery. For it might still be that he did not wish her to know what she had done for him.
But he put his arm about her, boyishly, and drew her toward one of the hard seats between the tables; and there, on the bare floor, he knelt before her, and hid his face in her lap. She sat motionless, feeling the dear warmth of his head against her knees, letting her hands stray in faint caresses through his hair.
Neither spoke for awhile; then he raised his head and looked at her. “I suppose you know what has been happening to me,” he said.
She shrank from seeming to press into his life a hair’s-breadth farther than he was prepared to have her go. Her eyes turned from him toward the scattered drawings on the table.
“You have given up the competition?” she said.
“Yes—and a lot more.” He stood up, the wave of emotion ebbing, yet leaving him nearer, in his recovered calmness, than in the shock of their first moment.
“I didn’t know, at first, how much you guessed,” he went on quietly. “I was sorry I’d shown you Darrow’s letter; but it didn’t worry me much because I didn’t suppose you’d think it possible that I should—take advantage of it. It’s only lately that I’ve understood that you knew everything.” He looked at her with a smile. “I don’t know yet how I found it out, for you’re wonderful about keeping things to yourself, and you never made a sign. I simply felt it in a kind of nearness—as if I couldn’t get away from you.—Oh, there were times when I should have preferred not having you about—when I tried to turn my back on you, to see things from other people’s standpoint. But you were always there—you wouldn’t be discouraged. And I got tired of trying to explain things to you, of trying to bring you round to my way of thinking. You wouldn’t go away and you wouldn’t come any nearer—you just stood there and watched everything that I was doing.”
He broke off, taking one of his restless turns down the long room. Then he drew up a chair beside her, and dropped into it with a great sigh.
“At first, you know, I hated it most awfully. I wanted to be let alone and to work out my own theory of things. If you’d said a word—if you’d tried to influence me—the spell would have been broken. But just because the actualyoukept apart and didn’t meddle or pry, the other, the you in my heart, seemed to get a tighter hold on me. I don’t know how to tell you,—it’s all mixed up in my head—but old things you’d said and done kept coming back to me, crowding between me and what I was trying for, looking at me without speaking, like old friends I’d gone back on, till I simply couldn’t stand it any longer. I fought it off till to-night, but when I came back to finish the work there you were again—and suddenly, I don’t know how, you weren’t an obstacle any longer, but a refuge—and I crawled into your arms as I used to when things went against me at school.”
His hands stole back into hers, and he leaned his head against her shoulder like a boy.
“I’m an abysmally weak fool, you know,” he ended; “I’m not worth the fight you’ve put up for me. But I want you to know that it’s your doing—that if you had let go an instant I should have gone under—and that if I’d gone under I should never have come up again alive.”