Part 32 (1/2)

”Oh,--good-bye,” she faltered, as if she had not had the word ready, and was relieved to have him supply it.

He stopped again on the threshold, looked back at her, began to speak.

”I've--” he said; then he repeated ”Good-bye,” as though to make sure he had not forgotten to say it; and the door closed on him.

It was over; she had had her last chance and missed it. Now, whatever happened, the one thing she had lived and longed for would never be. He had come, and she had let him go again....

How had it come about? Would she ever be able to explain it to herself?

How was it that she, so fertile in strategy, so practiced in feminine arts, had stood there before him, helpless, inarticulate, like a school-girl a-choke with her first love-longing? If he was gone, and gone never to return, it was her own fault, and none but hers. What had she done to move him, detain him, make his heart beat and his head swim as hers were beating and swimming? She stood aghast at her own inadequacy, her stony inexpressiveness....

And suddenly she lifted her hands to her throbbing forehead and cried out: ”But this is love! This must be love!”

She had loved him before, she supposed; for what else was she to call the impulse that had drawn her to him, taught her how to overcome his scruples, and whirled him away with her on their mad adventure? Well, if that was love, this was something so much larger and deeper that the other feeling seemed the mere dancing of her blood in tune with his....

But, no! Real love, great love, the love that poets sang, and privileged and tortured beings lived and died of, that love had its own superior expressiveness, and the sure command of its means. The petty arts of coquetry were no farther from it than the numbness of the untaught girl. Great love was wise, strong, powerful, like genius, like any other dominant form of human power. It knew itself, and what it wanted, and how to attain its ends.

Not great love, then... but just the common humble average of human love was hers. And it had come to her so newly, so overwhelmingly, with a face so grave, a touch so startling, that she had stood there petrified, humbled at the first look of its eyes, recognizing that what she had once taken for love was merely pleasure and spring-time, and the flavour of youth.

”But how was I to know? And now it's too late!” she wailed.

XXIX

THE inhabitants of the little house in Pa.s.sy were of necessity early risers; but when Susy jumped out of bed the next morning no one else was astir, and it lacked nearly an hour of the call of the bonne's alarm-clock.

For a moment Susy leaned out of her dark room into the darker night.

A cold drizzle fell on her face, and she s.h.i.+vered and drew back. Then, lighting a candle, and shading it, as her habit was, from the sleeping child, she slipped on her dressing-gown and opened the door. On the threshold she paused to look at her watch. Only half-past five! She thought with compunction of the unkindness of breaking in on Junie Fulmer's slumbers; but such scruples did not weigh an ounce in the balance of her purpose. Poor Junie would have to oversleep herself on Sunday, that was all.

Susy stole into the pa.s.sage, opened a door, and cast her light on the girl's face.

”Junie! Dearest Junie, you must wake up!”

Junie lay in the abandonment of youthful sleep; but at the sound of her name she sat up with the promptness of a grown person on whom domestic burdens have long weighed.

”Which one of them is it?” she asked, one foot already out of bed.

”Oh, Junie dear, no... it's nothing wrong with the children... or with anybody,” Susy stammered, on her knees by the bed.

In the candlelight, she saw Junie's anxious brow darken reproachfully.

”Oh, Susy, then why--? I was just dreaming we were all driving about Rome in a great big motor-car with father and mother!”

”I'm so sorry, dear. What a lovely dream! I'm a brute to have interrupted it--”

She felt the little girl's awakening scrutiny. ”If there's nothing wrong with anybody, why are you crying, Susy? Is it you there's something wrong with? What has happened?”

”Am I crying?” Susy rose from her knees and sat down on the counterpane.

”Yes, it is me. And I had to disturb you.”