Part 10 (2/2)

The nurse had forgotten to bring a chair for Stella. She leaned against the door until a red-haired boy with a bandaged arm, on the bed nearest to her, exclaimed earnestly:

”Do take my chair! You look awfully done.”

She was able to take his chair because her hands were less blind than any other part of her, and she smiled at him because she had the habit of smiling when she thanked people. Then her eyes went back to Julian.

Her heart had never left him; and she knew now that it never would leave him again.

She did not know how long or short it was before Marian rose gracefully, and said in her clear, sweet voice, ”I shall come again to-morrow, Julian.”

Marian stopped at each of the other bedsides before she joined Stella.

She said little, friendly, inclusive words to the other two men, which made them feel as if they would like to sweep the floor under her feet.

”All the same,” the red-haired man explained after the door closed, ”it was the untidy little one, piled up against the door, that minded most.

I dare say she was his sister.”

He had no need to lower his voice, though he did lower it, for fear of its reaching Julian.

Julian had been rea.s.sured, and now he was resting. Consciousness had altogether receded from him, perhaps that it might give him a better chance of resting.

CHAPTER XIII

Julian roused himself with the feeling that he had said only half of what he had intended to say to Marian. It had been in his mind a long time. It was while he was lying out under the pine-trees that he had realized what he had got to say to Marian if he ever got back. There was a complicated cipher message for the Government, which he had kept quite clear in his mind, and eventually given to an intelligent doctor to send off; and there was the message to Marian, which he himself would have to say when he saw her.

”I've come back, as I promised; but I can't marry you now, of course.

I'm a crock.”

The first time he saw Marian he had got through only the first part of the sentence. There was no hurry about the rest of it. The doctor and the sister had both a.s.sured him that there was no hurry. They had been very kind, and quite as honest as their profession permitted. They said Marian would come back, and he could tell her then.

They admitted, when he cross-questioned them with all the sharpness of which he was capable, that he would be a cripple. They did not bother him with futile commiserations. They gave him quietly and kindly the facts he asked for. He would never be able to walk again, but he could get about easily on crutches.

Julian did not want to live very much, but his mother's eyes hurt him when he tried not to; and then Marian came again, and he got through the rest of his sentence.

”You see,” he explained in a low whisper which sounded in his head like a gong, ”marriage is quite out of the question.”

Marian was there with smiles and flowers, just as he had so often pictured her; but she sat down with a curious solidity, and her voice sounded clearer than it had sounded in his dreams.

”Nothing alters our engagement, Julian,” she said. ”Nothing can.”

She spoke with a finality that stopped his thinking. He had finished his sentence, and it seemed hardly fair to be expected to start another on the spur of the moment. He gave himself up to a feeling of intense relief: he had got off his cipher to the Government and he had released Marian.

He had known these were going to be difficult things to do. The cipher had been the worst. The French doctor had taken some time to understand that Julian must neither die nor be attended to until he had sent the cipher off; and now the business about Marian was over, too. He had only to lie there and look at her day by day coming in with roses. They did not talk much. Julian never spoke of his symptoms, but they were too radical to free him. He lay under them like a creature pinned under the wreckage of a railway accident.

Slowly, day by day, his strength came back to him; and as it came back, peace receded. His eyes lost their old adoring indulgence; they seemed to be watching Marian covertly, anxious for some gift that she was withholding from him. He did not demand this as a right, as the old Julian would have done, breaking down the barriers of her pride to reach it. He pleaded for it with shamed eyes that met hers only to glance away. Something in her that was not cruelty as much as a baffling desire to escape him made her refuse to give him what his eyes asked.

Julian had loved her for her elusiveness, and the uncaptured does not yield readily to any appeal from the hunter. The prize is to the strong.

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