Part 73 (1/2)

II

Since the hurried departure of Mr. Pilkington, Jill had been sitting in the auditorium, lazily listening to the music and watching the couples dancing on the stage. She found herself drifting into a mood of gentle contentment, and was at a loss to account for this. She was happy--quietly and peacefully happy, when she was aware that she ought to have been both agitated and apprehensive. When she had antic.i.p.ated the recent interview with Otis Pilkington, which she had known was bound to come sooner or later, it had been shrinkingly and with foreboding. She hated hurting people's feelings, and, though she read Mr. Pilkington's character accurately enough to know that time would heal any anguish which she might cause him, she had had no doubt that the temperamental surface of that long young man, when he succeeded in getting her alone, was going to be badly bruised. And it had fallen out just as she had expected. Mr. Pilkington had said his say and departed, a pitiful figure, a spectacle which should have wrung her heart. It had not wrung her heart. Except for one fleeting instant when she was actually saying the fatal words, it had not interfered with her happiness at all; and already she was beginning to forget that the incident had ever happened.

And, if the past should have depressed her, the future might have been expected to depress her even more. There was nothing in it, either immediate or distant, which could account for her feeling gently contented. And yet, as she leaned back in her seat, her heart was dancing in time to the dance-music of Mrs. Peagrim's hired orchestra.

It puzzled Jill.

And then, quite suddenly, yet with no abruptness or sense of discovery, just as if it were something which she had known all along, the truth came upon her. It was Wally, the thought of Wally, the knowledge that Wally existed, that made her happy. He was a solid, comforting, rea.s.suring fact in a world of doubts and perplexities. She did not need to be with him to be fortified, it was enough just to think of him. Present or absent, his personality heartened her like fine weather or music or a sea-breeze--or like that friendly, soothing night-light which they used to leave in her nursery when she was little, to scare away the goblins and see her safely over the road that led to the gates of the city of dreams.

Suppose there were no Wally...?

Jill gave a sudden gasp, and sat up, tingling. She felt as she had sometimes felt as a child, when, on the edge of sleep, she had dreamed that she was stepping off a precipice and had woken, tense and alert, to find that there was no danger after all. But there was a difference between that feeling and this. She had woken, but to find that there was danger. It was as though some inner voice was calling to her to be careful, to take thought. Suppose there were no Wally?... And why should there always be Wally? He had said confidently enough that there would never be another girl.... But there were thousands of other girls, millions of other girls, and could she suppose that one of them would not have the sense to snap up a treasure like Wally? A sense of blank desolation swept over Jill. Her quick imagination, leaping ahead, had made the vague possibility of a distant future an accomplished fact. She felt, absurdly, a sense of overwhelming loss.

Into her mind, never far distant from it, came the thought of Derek.

And, suddenly, Jill made another discovery. She was thinking of Derek, and it was not hurting. She was thinking of him quite coolly and clearly and her heart was not aching.

She sat back and screwed her eyes tight, as she had always done when puzzled. Something had happened to her, but how it had happened and when it had happened and why it had happened she could not understand.

She only knew that now for the first time she had been granted a moment of clear vision and was seeing things truly.

She wanted Wally. She wanted him in the sense that she could not do without him. She felt nothing of the fiery tumult which had come upon her when she first met Derek. She and Wally would come together with a smile and build their life on an enduring foundation of laughter and happiness and good-fellows.h.i.+p. Wally had never shaken and never would shake her senses as Derek had done. If that was love, then she did not love Wally. But her clear vision told her that it was not love. It might be the blazing and crackling of thorns, but it was not the fire.

She wanted Wally. She needed him as she needed the air and the sunlight.

She opened her eyes and saw Uncle Chris coming down the aisle towards her. There was a man with him, and, as they moved closer in the dim light, Jill saw that it was Derek.

”Jill, my dear,” said Uncle Chris, ”here is an old friend to see you!”

And, having achieved their bringing together, he proceeded to withdraw delicately whence he had come. It is pleasant to be able to record that he was immediately seized upon by Mrs. Peagrim, who had changed her mind about not dancing, and led off to be her partner in a fox-trot, in the course of which she trod on his feet three times.

”Why, Derek!” said Jill cheerfully. Except for a mild wonder how he came to be there, she found herself wholly unaffected by the sight of him. ”Whatever are _you_ doing here?”

Derek sat down beside her. The cordiality of her tone had relieved, yet at the same time disconcerted him. Man seldom attains to perfect contentment in this world, and Derek, while pleased that Jill apparently bore him no ill-will, seemed to miss something in her manner which he would have been glad to find there.

”Jill!” he said huskily.

It seemed to Derek only decent to speak huskily. To his orderly mind this situation could be handled only in one way. It was a plain, straight issue of the strong man humbling himself--not too much of course, but sufficiently: and it called, in his opinion, for the low voice, the clenched hand, and the broken whisper. Speaking as he had spoken, he had given the scene the right key from the start--or would have done if she had not got in ahead of him and opened it on a note of absurd cheeriness? Derek found himself resenting her cheeriness.

Often as he had attempted during the voyage from England to visualize to himself this first meeting, he had never pictured Jill smiling brightly at him. It was a jolly smile, and made her look extremely pretty, but it jarred upon him. A moment before he had been half relieved, half disconcerted: now he was definitely disconcerted. He searched in his mind for a criticism of her att.i.tude, and came to the conclusion that what was wrong with it was that it was too friendly.

Friendliness is well enough in its way, but in what should have been a tense clas.h.i.+ng of strong emotions it did not seem to Derek fitting.

”Did you have a pleasant trip?” asked Jill. ”Have you come over on business?”

A feeling of bewilderment came upon Derek. It was wrong, it was all wrong. Of course, she might be speaking like this to cloak intense feeling, but, if so, she had certainly succeeded. From her manner, he and she might be casual acquaintances. A pleasant trip! In another minute she would be asking him how he had come out on the sweepstake on the s.h.i.+p's run. With a sense of putting his shoulder to some heavy weight and heaving at it, he sought to lift the conversation to a higher plane.

”I came to find _you_!” he said; still huskily but not so huskily as before. There are degrees of huskiness, and Derek's was sharpened a little by a touch of irritation.

”Yes?” said Jill.

Derek was now fermenting. What she ought to have said, he did not know, but he knew that it was not ”Yes?” ”Yes?” in the circ.u.mstances was almost as bad as ”Really?”