Part 36 (1/2)

She dropped back against the cus.h.i.+on as from weariness, and sudden tears brimmed into her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. He came to her at that in spite of the gesture that would have held him away.

”You must believe--it's nothing--but happiness,” she gasped.

He sat down upon the arm of the chair and a little timidly took her in his hands, caressed her eyes and her wet face until at last she met his lips in a long kiss and sank back quieted.

He stayed on the chair arm however and their hands remained clasped through a recollecting silence. She said presently:

”There are two or three practical things for you to remember. You mustn't be irritated with Violet Williamson. She has let herself become a little more sentimental about Fournier than I think in the beginning she meant to be and you may find her under foot more than you like. You mustn't mind that. And you'll find a very friendly helper in James Wallace. There is something a little caustic about his wit, and he suspects musicians on principle; but he will like you and he's thoroughly committed to _The Outcry_. He is a very good French scholar and over difficulties with the translation, where pa.s.sages have to be changed, he'll be a present help.”

He took her face in both his hands and turned it up to him. ”Mary,” he demanded when their eyes met, ”why are you saying good-by to me?”

CHAPTER XXIV

THE WHOLE STORY

The shot told. The harried, desperate look of panic with which she gazed at him and tried, tugging at his hands, to turn away, revealed to him that he had leaped upon the truth. Part of it anyhow. He closed his eyes, for an instant, for another unaddressed prayer that he might not falter nor let himself be turned aside until he had sounded the full depth of it.

When he looked at her again she had recovered her poise. ”It was silly,”

she said, ”to think that I could hide that from you. I am going away--to-morrow. For quite a long while.”

”Are you going away--physically? In the ordinary literal sense, I mean; or is it that you are just--going away from me?”

Once more it was as if a trap had been sprung upon her. But this time he ignored the gasp and the sudden cold slackness of the hands he held and went on speaking with hardly a pause.

”I asked that question, put it that way, thinking perhaps I understood and that I could make it easier for you to tell me.” He broke off, there, for an instant to get his voice under control. Then he asked, steadily, ”Are you going to marry Graham Stannard?”

She gasped again, but when he looked up at her there was nothing in her face but an incredulous astonishment.

So there was one alternative shorn away; one that he had not conceived as more than a very faint possibility. It was not into matrimony that her long journey was to take her. He pulled himself up with a jerk to answer--and it must be done smoothly and comfortably--the question she had just asked him. How in the world had he ever come to think of a thing like that?

”Why, it was in the air at Hickory Hill those days before you came.

And then Sylvia was explicit about it, as something every one was hoping for.”

”Was that why you went away?” she asked with an intent look into his face. ”Because he had a--prior claim, and it wouldn't be fair to--poach upon his preserves?”

He gave an ironic monosyllable laugh. ”I tried, for the next few days to bamboozle myself into adopting that explanation but I couldn't. The truth was, of course, that I ran away simply because I was frightened. Sheer panic terror of the thing that had taken hold of me. The thought of meeting you that next morning was--unendurable.”

She too uttered a little laugh but it sounded like one of pure happiness.

She buried her face in his hands and touched each palm with her lips. ”I couldn't have borne it if you'd said the other thing,” she told him. ”But I might have trusted you not to. Because you're not a sentimentalist.

You're almost the only person I know who is not.”

She added a moment later, with a sudden tightening of her grip upon his hands, ”Have you, too, discovered that sentimentality is the crudest thing in the world? It is. It is perfectly ruthless. It makes more tragedies than malice. Ludicrous tragedies--which are less endurable than the other sort. Unless one were enough of an Olympian so that he could laugh.” She relaxed again and made a nestling movement toward him. ”I thought for a while of you that way.”

He managed to speak as if the idea amused him. ”As an Olympian? No, if I had a mountain it wouldn't be that one. But I like the valleys better, anyhow.”

”I know,” she said contentedly. Then her voice darkened. ”I'm just at the beginning of you--now...” The sentence ended unnaturally, though he had done nothing to interrupt it.

Deliberately he startled her. ”What time does your train go, to-morrow?”

he asked. ”Or haven't you selected one? You haven't even told me where it is you are going.”