"How long is Sir Basil going to stay here?" Jack asked.

"All summer. He goes to Canada with the Pakenhams, and out to the West, for a glimpse of the changes since he was here years and years ago; and then I want him to come to Vermont, to us. You and Imogen will both get to know him well there. Of course you are coming; Imogen told me that she asked you long ago."

"Yes; I shall enjoy that immensely," the young man answered, with, for his own consciousness, a touch of irrepressible gloom. He didn't look forward to the continuation of the drama, to his own lame and merely negative part in it, at the close quarters of a house-party among the Vermont hills.

And as if Valerie bad felt the inner doubt she added suddenly, on a different key, "You really will enjoy it, won't you?"

He looked up at her. Her face, illuminated by the firelight, though dimmed against the evening blue outside, was turned on him with its sudden intentness and penetration of gaze.

"Why, of course," he almost stammered, confused by the unexpected scrutiny.

"I shall love having you, you know," she said.

"I shall love being with you," he answered, now without a single inner reserve.

Her intentness seemed to soften, there was solicitude and a sort of persuasiveness in it. "And you will have a much better chance of really adjusting things there--your friendship with Imogen, I mean. The country smoothes things out. Things get sweet and simple."

He didn't know what to say. Her mistake, if it were one, was so inevitable.

"Imogen will have taken her bearings by then," she went on. "She has had so much to get accustomed to, to bear with, poor child; her great bereavement, and--and a mother who, in some ways, must always be a trial to her."

"Oh, a trial!"--Jack lamely murmured.

"I recognize it, Jack. I think that you do. But when she makes up her mind to me, and discovers that, at all events, I don't interfere with anything that she really cares about, she will be able to take up all her old threads again."

"I--I suppose so," Jack murmured.

He had dropped his eyes, for he knew that hers were on him. And now, in a lowered voice, he heard her say, "Jack, I hope that you will help me with Imogen."

"Help you? How do you mean?" startled, he looked up.

"You know. Interpret me to her now and then, when you can, with kindliness.

You understand me so much more kindly than she does."

His eyes fixed on hers, deeply flushing--"Oh, but,"--he breathed out with almost a long sigh,--"that's what I have done, you see, ever since--"

"Ever since what?"

"Since I came to understand you so much better than she does."

There was a long pause now and, the firelight flickering low, he could hardly see her face. But he recognized change in her voice as she said: "You have? I don't mean, you know, taking my side in disputes."

"I know; I don't mean that, either, though, perhaps, I can't help doing it; for," said Jack, "it's on your side that I am, you know."

The change in her voice, but controlled, kept down, she answered quickly,

"Ah, but, dear Jack, I don't want to have a side. It's that that I want her to realize. I want her to feel that my side is hers. I want you to help me in making her feel it."

"But she'll never feel it!" Jack breathed out again. Behind the barrier of the tea-table, in the flickering dimness, they were speaking suddenly with a murmuring, yet so sharp a confidence; a confidence that in broad daylight, or in complete solitude, might have seemed impossible. All sorts of things must steal out in that persuasive, that peopled yet solitary, twilight.

He knew that Valerie's eyes dwelt on him with anxiety and that it was with a faint, forced smile that she asked him: "She doesn't think that I'll ever reach her side?"

"_I_ don't believe you ever will," said Jack. Then, for he couldn't bear that she should misunderstand him for another moment, misunderstanding when they had come so far was too unendurable, he went on in a hurried undertone: "You aren't on her side, really. You can never be on her side.

You can never be like her, or see like her. And I don't want you to. It's you who see clearly, not she. It's you who are all right."

Her long silence, after this, seemed to him like the hovering of hands upon him; as though, in darkness, she sought by touch to recognize some strange object put before her.

"But then,--" she, too, only breathed it out at last,--"but then,--you are not on _her_ side."

"That's just it," said Jack. He did not look at her and she was silent once more before his confession.

"But," she again took up the search, "that is terrible for her, if she feels it."

"And for me, too, isn't it?" he questioned, as if he turned the surfaces of the object beneath her fingers.

The soft, frightened hover seemed to go all over it, to recognize it finally, and to draw back, terrified, from recognition.

"Most terrible of all for me, if I have come between you," she said.

Her pain pierced him so, that he put out his hand and took hers. Don't think that; you mustn't think that, not for a moment. It's not that you came between us. It's only that, because of you, I began to see things--as I hadn't seen them. It was just,--well, just like seeing one color change when another is put beside it. Imogen's blue, now that your gold has come, is turned to green; that's all that has happened."

"All that has happened! Do you know what you are saying, Jack! If my gold were gone, would the blue come back again?"

"The blue will never come back," said Jack.

He felt, as her hand tightened on his, that he would have liked to put his head down on her knees and sob like a little boy; but when she said, "And the green you cannot care for?" his own hand tightened as if they clutched some secret together, some secret that neither must dare look at. "You mustn't think that--you mustn't. And I mustn't." He said it with all the revolt and all the strength of his will and loyalty; with all his longing, too. "The real truth is that the green can't care for me unless I will see it back to blue again--and as I can't do that, and as it won't accept my present vision, there is a sort of dead-lock."

For a long moment her hand continued to grasp his, before, as if taking in the ambiguous comfort of his final definiteness, it relaxed and she drew it away.

"Perhaps she will care enough," she said.

"To accept my vision? To forego blue? To consent that I shall see her as green?"

"Yes, when she has taken up all the threads."

"Perhaps she will," said Jack.

XVI

It was a few days after this, just before Jack's return to Boston--and the parting now was to be until they met in Vermont--that he and Imogen had another walk, another talk together.

The mid-May had become seasonably mild and, at Jack's suggestion, they had taken the elevated cars up to Central Park for the purpose of there seeing the wistaria in its full bloom.

They strolled in the sunlight under arbors rippling all over with the exquisite purple, dark and pale, the thin fine leaves of a strange olive-green, the delicate tendrils; they pa.s.sed into open s.p.a.ces where, on gray rocks, it streamed like the tresses of a cascade; it climbed and heaped itself on wayside trellises and ran nimbly, in a shower of fragile color, up the trunks, along the branches, of the trees. Jack always afterward a.s.sociated the soft, falling purple, the soft, languorous fragrance, the almost uncanny beauty of the wistaria, with melancholy and presage.