Part 17 (2/2)

She had not made good her resolution to quit thinking about him. She was not able and did not even attempt to dismiss her adventure with him as a mere regrettable folly to be forgotten as soon as possible. It had often come back to her during sleepless hours of the long nights and had always been made welcome. She didn't wish it defaced as she had felt it necessarily must be by the painful anti-climax of a second meeting.

The impulse upon which she had taken him out of old Nat's hands was perhaps a little surprising now she looked back on it, but it had not astonished her at the time. Of course, there, there was something concretely to be done, an injustice to be averted from a possibly innocent head. She doubted though if it had been pure altruism.

Whatever its nature, the result of it had been altogether happy. She _was_ glad she had come down to see him. There need be no misgiving now about the quality of their future encounters, were there to be any such.

They were on solid ground with each other.

How had that been brought about? How had they managed to talk to each other for anyway fifteen or twenty minutes without either a reference to their adventure or a palpable avoidance of it? It wasn't her doing. From the moment when she got to the end of the lines she had rehea.r.s.ed coming down the stairs, the lead had been in his hands. Indeed, to the latter part of the talk, what she had contributed was no more than a question or two so flagrantly personal that they reminded her in review of some of her childish indiscretions with Wallace Hood. How had he managed it?

He hadn't been tactful. She acquitted him altogether of that. She couldn't have endured tact this afternoon from anybody. Of course, the mere expressiveness of his face helped a lot. The look he had turned on Rush for example, that had stopped that nerve-racked boy in full career.

Or the look he gave her when he first learned of her father's illness.

That sudden coming back from whatever his own preoccupation might have been to a vivid concern for her father.

Well, there, at last, it was. That was his quality. A genius for more than forgetting himself, for stepping clean out of himself into some one else's shoes. Wasn't that just a long way of saying imagination? He had illuminated her father for her and in so doing had given her a ray of real comfort. He had interpreted Paula--in terms how different from those employed by Aunt Lucile! He had comprehended Rush without one momentary flaw of resentment. Last of all, he had quite simply and without one vitiating trace of self-pity, explained himself, luminously, so that it was as if she had known him all her life.

One thing, to be sure, she didn't in the least understand--the very last thing he had said. ”That's why it was so incredible when you came down the stairs instead.” That had been to her, a complete non sequitur, an enigma. But she was content to leave it at that.

Such a man, of course, could never--belong to anybody. He was not collectable. There would always be about him, for everybody, some last enigma, some room to which no one would be given the key. But there was a virtue even in the fringe of him, the hem of his garment.

Was she getting sentimental? No, she was not. Indeed, precisely what his little visit had done for her was to effect her release from a tangle of taut-drawn sentimentalities. She hadn't felt as free as this, as comfortable with herself, since she came home with Rush from New York.

She had no a.s.surance that he'd come to the house again of his own accord or that Paula would send for him. But she was in no mood to distress herself just now, even with that possibility.

She crossed the room and got herself a cigarette, and with it alight she returned to her contemplation of the piano keyboard. She didn't move nor speak when she heard Rush come in but she kept an eye on the drawing-room door and when presently he entered, she greeted him with a smile of good-humored mockery. He had something that looked like a battered school atlas in his hand.

”What do you suppose this is?” he asked. ”It was lying on the bench in the hall.”

She held out a hand for it and together they opened it on the lid of the piano and investigated.

”It's the ma.n.u.script of his opera,” she said. ”He brought it around to leave with Paula. To tell her he had done with it. He's been trying to spoil it for her but he can't.”

”I suppose I made an infernal fool of myself,” he remarked, after a little silence.

She blew, for answer, an impudent smoke ring up into his face.

He continued grumpily to cover his relief that she had not been more painfully explicit,--”I suppose I shall have to make up some sort of d.a.m.ned apology to him.”

”I don't know,” she said. ”That's as you like. I don't believe he'd insist upon it. He understood well enough.”

He looked at her intently. ”Has there been any better news from father since I went out?” he asked.

She shook her head. ”Except that there's been none. Every hour now that we aren't sent for counts. What made you think there might have been?”

He said he didn't know. She looked a little more cheerful somehow, less--tragic. Evidently her visit to the Corbetts had done her good.

His eye fell once more on the ma.n.u.script. ”Did he go off and forget that?” he asked. ”Or did he mean to leave it for Paula? And what shall we do with it,--hand it over to her or send it back?”

Thoughtfully Mary straightened the sheets and closed the cover. ”I'll take care of it for him,” she said.

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