"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 shivered 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."

"Oh, Susy, darling, what is it?" Junie's arms were about her in a flash, and Susy grasped them in burning fingers.

"Junie, listen! I've got to go away at once--to leave you all for the whole day. I may not be back till late this evening; late to-night; I can't tell. I promised your mother I'd never leave you; but I've got to--I've got to."

Junie considered her agitated face with fully awakened eyes. "Oh, I won't tell, you know, you old brick," she said with simplicity.

Susy hugged her. "Junie, Junie, you darling! But that wasn't what I meant. Of course you may tell--you must tell. I shall write to your mother myself. But what worries me is the idea of having to go away--away from Paris--for the whole day, with Geordie still coughing a little, and no one but that silly Angele to stay with him while you're out--and no one but you to take yourself and the others to school. But Junie, Junie, I've got to do it!" she sobbed out, clutching the child tighter.

Junie Fulmer, with her strangely mature perception of the case, and seemingly of every case that fate might call on her to deal with, sat for a moment motionless in Susy's hold. Then she freed her wrists with an adroit twist, and leaning back against the pillows said judiciously: "You'll never in the world bring up a family of your own if you take on like this over other people's children."

Through all her turmoil of spirit the observation drew a laugh from Susy. "Oh, a family of my own--I don't deserve one, the way I'm behaving to your--"

Junie still considered her. "My dear, a change will do you good: you need it," she p.r.o.nounced.

Susy rose with a laughing sigh. "I'm not at all sure it will! But I've got to have it, all the same. Only I do feel anxious--and I can't even leave you my address!"

Junie still seemed to examine the case.

"Can't you even tell me where you're going?" she ventured, as if not quite sure of the delicacy of asking.

"Well--no, I don't think I can; not till I get back. Besides, even if I could it wouldn't be much use, because I couldn't give you my address there. I don't know what it will be."

"But what does it matter, if you're coming back to-night?"

"Of course I'm coming back! How could you possibly imagine I should think of leaving you for more than a day?"

"Oh, I shouldn't be afraid--not much, that is, with the poker, and Nat's water-pistol," emended Junie, still judicious.

Susy again enfolded her vehemently, and then turned to more practical matters. She explained that she wished if possible to catch an eight-thirty train from the Gare de Lyon, and that there was not a moment to lose if the children were to be dressed and fed, and full instructions written out for Junie and Angele, before she rushed for the underground.

While she bathed Geordie, and then hurried into her own clothes, she could not help wondering at her own extreme solicitude for her charges.

She remembered, with a pang, how often she had deserted Clarissa Vanderlyn for the whole day, and even for two or three in succession--poor little Clarissa, whom she knew to be so unprotected, so exposed to evil influences. She had been too much absorbed in her own greedy bliss to be more than intermittently aware of the child; but now, she felt, no sorrow however ravaging, no happiness however absorbing, would ever again isolate her from her kind.

And then these children were so different! The exquisite Clarissa was already the predestined victim of her surroundings: her budding soul was divided from Susy's by the same barrier of incomprehension that separated the latter from Mrs. Vanderlyn. Clarissa had nothing to teach Susy but the horror of her own hard little appet.i.tes; whereas the company of the noisy argumentative Fulmers had been a school of wisdom and abnegation.

As she applied the brush to Geordie's shining head and the handkerchief to his snuffling nose, the sense of what she owed him was so borne in on Susy that she interrupted the process to catch him to her bosom.

"I'll have such a story to tell you when I get back to-night, if you'll promise me to be good all day," she bargained with him; and Geordie, always astute, bargained back: "Before I promise, I'd like to know what story."

At length all was in order. Junie had been enlightened, and Angele stunned, by the minuteness of Susy's instructions; and the latter, waterproofed and stoutly shod, descended the doorstep, and paused to wave at the pyramid of heads yearning to her from an upper window.

It was hardly light, and still raining, when she turned into the dismal street. As usual, it was empty; but at the corner she perceived a hesitating taxi, with luggage piled beside the driver. Perhaps it was some early traveller, just arriving, who would release the carriage in time for her to catch it, and thus avoid the walk to the metro, and the subsequent strap-hanging; for it was the work-people's hour. Susy raced toward the vehicle, which, overcoming its hesitation, was beginning to move in her direction. Observing this, she stopped to see where it would discharge its load. Thereupon the taxi stopped also, and the load discharged itself in front of her in the shape of Nick Lansing.

The two stood staring at each other through the rain till Nick broke out: "Where are you going? I came to get you."

"To get me? To get me?" she repeated. Beside the driver she had suddenly remarked the old suit-case from which her husband had obliged her to extract Strefford's cigars as they were leaving Como; and everything that had happened since seemed to fall away and vanish in the pang and rapture of that memory.

"To get you; yes. Of course." He spoke the words peremptorily, almost as if they were an order. "Where were you going?" he repeated.