Part 19 (1/2)

”I've seen her again.”

”Yes, I know.”

”She told me you knew it,” he said, ”--that she had told you.”

”Yes.”

”But that's not all,” he said, his voice rising a little. ”I saw her again the day after she told you--”

”You did!” I murmured.

”Oh, I tell myself that it's a dream,” he cried, ”that it CAN'T be true. For it has been EVERY day since then! That's why I haven't joined you in the woods. I have been with her, walking with her, listening to her, looking at her--always feeling that it must be unreal and that I must try not to wake up. She has been so kind--so wonderfully, beautifully kind to me!”

”She has met you?” I asked, thinking ruefully of George Ward, now on the high seas in the pleasant company of old hopes renewed.

”She has let me meet her. And to-day we lunched at the inn at Dives and then walked by the sea all afternoon. She gave me the whole day--the whole day! You see”--he began to pace again--”you see I was right, and you were wrong. She wasn't offended--she was glad--that I couldn't help speaking to her; she has said so.”

”Do you think,” I interrupted, ”that she would wish you to tell me this?”

”Ah, she likes you!” he said so heartily, and appearing meanwhile so satisfied with the completeness of his reply, that I was fain to take some satisfaction in it myself. ”What I wanted most to say to you,” he went on, ”is this: you remember you promised to tell me whatever you could learn about her--and about her husband?”

”I remember.”

”It's different now. I don't want you to,” he said. ”I want only to know what she tells me herself. She has told me very little, but I know when the time comes she WILL tell me everything. But I wouldn't hasten it. I wouldn't have anything changed from just THIS!”

”You mean--”

”I mean the way it IS. If I could hope to see her every day, to be in the woods with her, or down by the sh.o.r.e--oh, I don't want to know anything but that!”

”No doubt you have told her,” I ventured, ”a good deal about yourself,”

and was instantly ashamed of myself. I suppose I spoke out of a sense of protest against Mrs. Harman's strange lack of conventionality, against so charming a lady's losing her head as completely as she seemed to have lost hers, and it may have been, too, out of a feeling of jealousy for poor George--possibly even out of a little feeling of the same sort on my own account. But I couldn't have said it except for the darkness, and, as I say, I was instantly ashamed.

It does not whiten my guilt that the shaft did not reach him.

”I've told her all I know,” he said readily, and the unconscious pathos of the answer smote me. ”And all that Keredec has let me know. You see I haven't--”

”But do you think,” I interrupted quickly, anxious, in my remorse, to divert him from that channel, ”do you think Professor Keredec would approve, if he knew?”

”I think he would,” he responded slowly, pausing in his walk again. ”I have a feeling that perhaps he does know, and yet I have been afraid to tell him, afraid he might try to stop me--keep me from going to wait for her. But he has a strange way of knowing things; I think he knows everything in the world! I have felt to-night that he knows this, and--it's very strange, but I--well, what WAS it that made him so glad?”

”The light is still burning in his room,” I said quietly.

”You mean that I ought to tell him?” His voice rose a little.

”He's done a good deal for you, hasn't he?” I suggested. ”And even if he does know he might like to hear it from you.”

”You're right; I'll tell him to-night.” This came with sudden decision, but with less than marked what followed. ”But he can't stop me, now. No one on earth shall do that, except Madame d'Armand herself. No one!”

”I won't quarrel with that,” I said drily, throwing away my cigar, which had gone out long before.