"Yes;--I remember."

"It has faded further and further away, her blue, hasn't it?"

"Yes," he confessed.

"So that you are hardly friends, Jack?"

He paused for a moment, and then completed his confession:--"We are not friends."

Valerie stood still, breathing as if with a little difficulty after the gradual ascent. The tall trees about them were dark and full of mystery on the pale mysterious sky. Through the branches they could see the glint of the moon's diminished disk.

"That is terrible, you know," said Valerie, after they had stood in silence for some moments.

"I know it."

"For both of you."

"Worse for me, because I cared more, really cared more."

"No, worse for her, for it is you who have judged and rejected her."

"She thinks that it is she who has judged and rejected me."

"She tries to think it; she does not always succeed. It has been bitter, it has been cruel for her."

"Oh, yes, bitter and cruel," he a.s.sented.

"Don't try to minimize her pain, Jack."

"You feel that I can't care, much?"

"It is horrible for me to feel it. Think of her when I came, so secure, so calm, so surrounded by love and appreciation. And now"--Valerie walked on, as if urged to motion by the controlled force of her own insistence. Was it an appeal to him that Imogen, dispossessed of the new love, might find again the old love opening to her? He clung to the hope, though with a sickening suspicion of its folly.

"By my coming, I have robbed her of everything," Valerie was saying, walking swiftly up the path and breathing as if with that slight difficulty--the sound of her breaths affected him with an almost intolerable sense of expectancy. "She isn't secure;--she isn't calm. She is warped;--her faiths are warped. Her friends are changed to her. She has lost you. It's as if I had shattered her life."

"Everything that wasn't real you have shattered."

The rustic bench was reached and they paused there, though with no eyes for the shaft of mystic distance that opened before them. Jack's eyes were on her and he was conscious of a rising insistence in himself that matched and opposed her own.

"But you must be sorry for her pain," said Valerie, and now, with eyes almost stern in their demand, she gazed at him;--"you must be sorry that she has had to lose so much. And you would be glad, would you not, to think that real things, a new life, were to come to her?"

He understood; even before the words, his fear, his presage, leaped forward to this crashing together of all his hopes. And it seemed to him that a flame pa.s.sed through him, shriveling in its ardent wrath all trite reticences and decorums.

"No; no, I should not be glad," he answered. His voice was violent; the eyes he fixed on her were violent. His words struck Imogen out of his life for ever.

"Why are you so cruel?" she faltered.

"I am cruel for _you_. I know what you want to do. You are going to give her _your_ life."

Quick as a flash she answered--it was like a rapier parrying his stroke:--"Give?--what have I to do with it, if it comes to her?"

"Everything! Everything!" he cried.

"Nothing. You are mistaken."

"Ah,--you could keep it, you could keep it--if you tried." And now his eyes pleaded--pleaded with her, for her own life's sake, to keep what was hers.

"You have only to _show_ her to him, as you did to me."

"You think--I could do that!--to my child!"--Through the darkness her white face looked a wild reproach at him.

He seized her hands:--"It's to do her no wrong!--It's only to be true, consciously, to him, as you were true, unconsciously, to me. It's only, not to let her rob you--not to let her rob him."

"Jack," she breathed heavily, "these are things that cannot be said."

"They must--they must--now, between us. I have my right. I've cared enough--to do anything, so that she should not rob you!" Jack groaned.

"She has not robbed me. It left me;--it went to her;--I saw it all. Even if I had been base enough, even if I had tried to keep it by showing her to him--as you say so horribly,--even then I should not have kept it. He would not have seen. Don't you understand;--he is not that sort of man. She will always be blue to him, and I will always be gold--though perhaps, now, a little tarnished. That's what is so beautiful in him--and so stupid. He doesn't see colors, as you and I do, Jack. That's what makes me sure that this is the happiest of fortunes for them both."

He had held her hands, gazing at her downcast face, its strength speaking from the shadow, its pain hidden from him, and now, before her resolution and her gentleness, he bent his head upon the hands he held. "Oh, but _you, you, you_!--It's _you_ whose life is shattered!" broke from him with a sob.

For a long while she stood silent above him, her hands enfolding his, as though she comforted his grief. He found himself at length kissing the gentle hands, with tears, and then, caressing his bent head with a light touch, she said: "Don't you see that the time has come for me to accept shatterings as in the order of things, dear Jack?--My mistake has been to believe that life can begin over again. It can't. One uses it up--merely by waiting. I've been an incurable girl till now;--and now, I've crashed from girlhood to middle-age in a week! It's been a crash, of course; the sort of crash one never mends of; but after to-day, after you sent me off with him, Jack, and I allowed myself, in spite of all my dread, my pride, my relinquishment, just one flicker of girlish hope,--after all this, I think that I must put on caps to show that I am really old at last."

He lifted his head and looked at her. Her face was lovely, with the silver disk of the moon above it and, about it, the mystery and sadness of the tranquil woods. So lovely, so young, with almost the trembling touch of a tender mockery, like the trembling of moonlit water, upon it. And all that he found to say at last was:--"What a fool he is."

She really smiled then, though tears sprang to her eyes with her comprehension of all that the helpless, boyish words struggled to subdue.

"Thanks for that, dear Jack,--and for all the other mistakes," she said.

There seemed nothing more to say, no questions to ask, or to answer. He must accept from her that her plight was irrevocable. It was as if he had seen a great stone rolled over the quivering, springing, shining fountain, sealing it, stilling it for ever. And, for his part, her word covered all.

His "mistakes" needed no further revealing.

They had turned and, in silence, were moving down the path again, when they heard, suddenly, the sound of light, swift footsteps approaching them. They paused, exchanging a glance of wonder; and Jack thought that he saw fear in Valerie's eyes. The day, already, had held overmuch of endurance for her, and it was not yet ended. In another moment, tall and illumined, Imogen appeared before them in the path.

Jack knew, in thinking it over afterward, that Imogen at her most baleful had been Imogen at her most beautiful. She had looked, as she emerged from shadow into light, like a virgin saint bent on some wild errand through the night, an errand brought to a proud pause, in which was no fear and no hesitancy, as her path was crossed by the spirits of an evil world. That was really just what she looked like, standing there before them, bathed in light, her eyes profound and stern, her hair crowning her with a glory of trans.m.u.ted gold, her head uplifted with a high, unfaltering purpose. That the shock of finding them there before her was great, one saw at once; and one could gage the strength of her purpose from her instantaneous surmounting of the shock.

And it was strange, in looking back, to remember how the time of colorless light and colorless shadow had seemed to divest them all of daily conventions and daily seemings. They might have been three disembodied souls met there in the moonlit woods and speaking the direct, unimpeded language of souls, for whom all concealments are useless.

"Oh--it is _you_," was what Imogen said; much as the virgin saint might have greeted the familiar demons who opposed her quest. _You_, meant both of them. She put them together into one category of evil, saw them as one in their enmity to her and to good. And she seemed to accept them as very much what a saint might expect to find on such a nocturnal errand.

Involuntarily Valerie had fallen back, and she had put her hand on Jack's shoulder in confusion more than in fear. Yet, feeling a menace in the white, shining presence, her voice faltered as she asked: "Imogen, what are you doing here?"

And it was at this point that Imogen reached, really, her own culmination.

Whatever shame, whatever hesitation, whatever impulsion to deceive when deception was so easy, she may have felt; to lie, when a lie would be so easily convincing, she rejected and triumphed over. Jack knew from her uplifted look that the moment would count with her always as one of her great ones one of the moments in which--as she had used to say to him sometimes in the days that were gone forever--one knew that one had "beat down Satan under one's feet."

"You have no right to ask me that," she said, "but I choose to answer you.

I have come here to meet Sir Basil."

"Meet him?" It was in pure bewilderment that Valerie questioned, helplessly, without reproach.