Yet, when they had disappeared, it was with the saddest drop to anxious, to gnawing uncertainty, that Jack turned back into the house. An echo of the fear that he had felt in Valerie seemed to float back to him. It was as if, in some strange way, he had handed her over to pain rather than to joy, to sacrifice rather than to attainment.

XXVII

Jack's morning was not a happy one. It was bad enough to have told so many fibs, or, at all events, to have invented so many opportune truths, and it was worse to have to go on inventing more of them to Mary, now that his dexterities had linked him to her.

Mary looked, as was only too natural, much surprised, when he told her that his letters required her help. She looked still more so when she found how inadequate were their contents to account for such a claim.

Indeed there was, apparently, but one letter upon which her advice could be of the least significance, and after she had given him all the information she had to give in regard to the charity for which it appealed, there was really nothing more for them to do.

"But--the letters that required the immediate answers?" she asked.

Jack's excited, plausible manner had dropped from him. Mary felt it difficult to be severe when his look of dejection was piercing her heart; still, she felt that she owed it to him as well as to herself, she must see a little more clearly into how he had "had things so."

He replied, his eye neither braving nor evading hers, that he had already answered them; and Mary, after a little pause, in which she studied her friend's face, said:--"I don't understand you this morning, Jack."

"I'm afraid you'll understand me less when I make you a confession. I didn't give your message this morning, Mary."

"Didn't give Mrs. Upton's message, to Miss Boc.o.c.k, to Sir Basil?"

"No," said Jack, but with more mildness and sadness than compunction;--"I want to be straight with you, at all events. So I'd rather tell you. All I did was to say to Sir Basil that I found I couldn't take Mrs. Upton for the drive I'd promised, so that if he wanted to take my place, he was welcome to the buggy. He wanted to, of course. That went without saying."

"Why, Jack Pennington!"

"Miss Boc.o.c.k, luckily, was on the other side of the veranda, so that I had only to go round to her afterward and tell her that Mrs. Upton had suggested their gardening, but that since she was going to drive with Sir Basil she could go off to the club, at once, too, with Imogen."

"But, Jack!--what did you mean by it?"--Mary, quite aghast, stared at her Machiavellian friend.

"Why, that Sir Basil should take her. That's all I meant from the beginning, when I proposed going myself. Do forgive me, you dear old brick.

You see, I'm so awfully set on her not being done out of things."

"Done out of things?"

"Oh, little things, if you like, young things. She's young, and she ought to have them. Say you forgive me."

"Of course, Jack dear, I forgive you, though I don't understand you. But that's not the point. Everything seems so queer, so twisted; every one seems different. And to find _you_ not straight is worst of all."

"I promise you, it's my last sin," said Jack.

Mary, though shaking her bewildered head, had to smile a little, and, the smile encouraging him to lightness, he remarked on her changed aspect.

"So do forgive and forget. I had to confess, when I'd not been true to you.

Really, my nature isn't warped. What an extremely becoming dress that is Mary;--and what have you done to your hair?"

"It's _she_," said Mary, flushing with pleasure.

"Mrs. Upton?"

"Yes, she did my hair and gave me the dress. She was so sweet and dear."

Jack lightly touched a plaited ruffle of the wide sleeve, and Mary felt that he had never less thought of her than when he so touched her dress.

She put aside the deep little pang that gave her to say: "It's true, Jack, she ought to have young things, just because they are going from her; one feels that: She oughtn't to be standing back, and giving up things, yet. I see a little what you mean. _Isn't_ it pretty?" Still, with an absent hand, he lightly touched, here and there, a ruffle of her sleeve. "But it's like her. I hardly feel myself in it."

"You've never so looked yourself," said Jack. "That's what she does, brings out people's real selves."

Mrs. Upton and Sir Basil did not come back to lunch, and Imogen's face was somber indeed as she faced her guests at the table. Jack, vigilant and pitiless, guessed at the turmoil of her soul.

She asked him, with an icy sweetness, how his letters had prospered. "Did you get them all off?"

Jack said that he had, and Mary, casting a wavering glance at him, saw that if he intended to sin no more, he showed, at all events, a sinful guilelessness of demeanor. She herself began to blush so helplessly and so furiously that Imogen's attention was drawn to her. Imogen, also, was vigilant.

"And what have you been doing, Mary dear?" she asked.

"I--oh"--poor Mary looked the sinful one;--"I--helped Jack a little."

"Helped Jack?--Oh, yes, he had heaps of letters, hadn't he? What were they all about, Mary?"

"Oh, charities."

"Charities?--What charities? How many charities?--I'm interested in that, you know--I'm rather hurt that you didn't ask my advice, too," and Imogen smiled her ominous smile. "What were the charities?"

Mary, crimson to the brow, her eyes on her plate, now did her duty.

"There was only one."

"One--and that of such consequence that Jack had to give up his drive because of it?--what an interesting letter."

"There were other letters, of course," Jack, in aid of his innocent accomplice, struck in. "None that would have particularly interested you, Imogen. I only needed advice about the one, a local Boston affair."

"There were others, Mary," said Imogen, laughing a little, "You needn't look so guilty on Jack's account." Mary gave her a wide, startled stare.

"You see, Mary," said Rose, after lunch in the drawing-room, "saints can sting."

"What was the matter!" Mary murmured, her head still seemed to buzz, as though from a violent box on the ear. "I never heard Imogen speak like that. To _hurt_ one!"

"I fancy she'd been getting thwarted in some way," said Rose comfortably; "saints do sting, then, sometimes, the first thing that happens to be at hand. How Jack and she hate each other!"

Mary went away to her room and cried.

Meanwhile Jack wandered about in the woods until, quite late in the afternoon, he saw from the rustic bench, where, finally, he had cast himself, the returning buggy climbing up through the lower woodlands.

He felt that his heart throbbed heavily as he watched it, just catching glimpses, among the trees, of the white bubble of Valerie's parasol slanting against the sun. Yet there was a dullness in his excitement. It was over, at all events. He was sure that the last die was cast. And his own trivial and somewhat indecorous part, of shifter of scenes and puller of strings, was, he felt sure, a thing put by forever. He could help her no longer. And in a sort of apathy, he sat out there in the sunny green, hardly thinking, hardly wondering, conscious only of a hope that had become a mere physical sense of oppression and of an underlying sadness that had become, almost, a physical sense of pain.

He had just consulted his watch and, seeing it wanted but ten minutes to tea-time, had got up and was moving away, when a sudden rustle near him, a pause, a quick, evasive footstep, warned him of some presence as anxious for solitude as himself.

He stood still for a moment, uncertain as to his own best means of retreat, but his stillness misled, for, in another moment, Valerie appeared before him from among the branches of a narrow side path.