"Why, Lucy?"

"You don't understand," she cried. "You have never had loving arms to go to when you were in trouble. I've had them and I've lost them. I mean I've lost the power to go to them and find comfort."

A picture of her running to my arms for comfort flashed through my mind, and troubled me to the marrow. And I had from that moment the definite wish to take her in my arms. And in that same moment I realized that those who thought we were too much together were not such meddling fools as I had thought them.

"Lucy," I said, and I hardly recognized my own voice. "Whatever happens, you've a friend who will never fail you."

"I know that," she said, and she held out her two hands, and I took them in mine.

"If you sent for me to the ends of the earth, I would come."

"I know that."

"There is nothing you could ask of me that I wouldn't give."

"I know that."

And that afternoon we rode together in the woods.

XVIII

A man must have descended to the very deepest levels of depression before he loses his power to laugh, or to be cheered by an unexpected bettering of his financial position. John Fulton was in a bad way, but certain things still struck him as funny, and the money which he had been enabled to borrow from the bank had eased his mind. Still, so Lucy told me, he could not sleep at night, and it must have been obvious to the most casual observer that he was a sick man. He had a drawn and hungry look. Jock and Hurry could by no means satisfy his appet.i.te for affection. Indeed, I think the sight and touch and the sounds of them at play were no great comfort to him at this time. He must have felt in their presence something of that anguish of pity which a man feels for children who have lost their mother.

He had hoped at first that Lucy's failure of affection was but a temporary aberration. But at last he must have come to despair of any change in her feelings for him, at least under existing conditions.

Indeed their relations were going from bad to worse. A man loved and beloved falls into habits of pa.s.sion for which there is no cure but death or old age. Yet a man would readily believe that separation might affect him like an opiate, and it must have been in this belief that Fulton determined to accompany Harry Colemain on a trip to Palm Beach. To me he vouchsafed the explanation that he was not well and that he couldn't sleep, and that when he wasn't well, and that when he couldn't sleep, his one thought and desire was to get to salt water.

"It always cures me," he said, just as if he had often been sick before. From Lucy I had the truth of the matter.

"He thinks," she said, "that if he goes away and stays away for a long time that perhaps I will miss him enough to want him back, and on the old footing. He isn't even going to write to me. It's going to be exactly as if he didn't exist."

"Do you think it wise for him to go, Lucy?"

"Perhaps it will do him good. It won't change me. I know that. If only he'd change. Haven't I done him enough harm to make him hate me?

Archie, I'm so sorry for him that I wish I was dead. And yet I want to live. I'm too young to die. I want to live, and be happy--happy the way I used to be happy."

"And you can't with John?"

She shook her head quietly. "It's the most wonderful thing to be in love!" she said. "I wonder what I did to have that wonderful thing? I wonder what I've done to deserve to lose it? And even if--even if it happened again it could never be the same. There can be only one first time--even if you've got a silly memory that doesn't remember very well. And you make ties and habits and all these have to be thrown overboard when the second time happens, and there's scandal, and cold shoulders, and--what do you think I _ought_ to do? If I can't give him what he's paying for oughtn't I to cut loose on my own, to support myself, and not be a burden to him and a ubiquitous reminder that we've failed to make a go of living together? What _ought_ I to do?"

It had become very hard for me to tell her what I thought she ought to do. Ever since that moment when I had first known that I wanted to take her in my arms and comfort her, I had begun to have doubts of my own honesty. And now she had put that honesty to a definite test, and I was determined that it should come through the ordeal alive.

"Must I really tell you what I think you ought to do?"

"Yes."

"Some of the things I think you ought to do, are things that I know you don't want to do--things that you think perhaps you _can't_ do. Women often say _can't_ when they mean _won't_, don't they?"

"Maybe."

"I'm afraid you aren't going to like what I'm going to say, nor me for saying it."

"Try me," she said, and she gave me a look of great trust and understanding.

"I'm going to tell you what I think you ought to do, Lucy, and what I think you ought to have done."

Any teacher whose scholars looked at him with the trustfulness and expectation with which Lucy now looked at me, must be inspired, I think, to the very top notch of his sense of honor and duty. I am sure at least that I laid the law down of what I thought she should do, and should have done with complete honesty and without regard to consequences. If I got nothing better for my pains than dislike, at least I could criticize her conduct and character without being biased by my growing affection for her.

"In the first place," I said, "when you found out that you no longer loved your husband, you made your first mistake. By your own admission he had given you everything in the way of devotion and faithfulness that a man can give a woman. When you found that you no longer loved him, you shouldn't have told him. He ought never to have known. You should have summoned all your fort.i.tude and delicacy to deceive him into thinking that you had not changed toward him, and never would."

"I _couldn't_!" exclaimed Lucy.

"You wouldn't," I said.

"It wouldn't have been honest."

"Perhaps not. But it would have been n.o.ble."

Lucy naturally enough preferred praise to blame, and this showed in her face and in her voice. I felt infinitely removed from our previous terms of intimate confidence, when she said: "Couldn't or wouldn't, it's history that I didn't."

"That being so," I said, "I think you should go now to your husband and tell him that love or no love you propose to be his faithful wife till death part you; to put him first in your head, if not in your heart.

It may be that through a long course of simulation you will come once more to care for him. Self-sacrifice is a n.o.ble weapon. I think, Lucy, that you would be very wise if you told him that two is not a lucky number."

"I don't understand."

"Jock and Hurry," I said, "are two."

She changed color to the roots of her hair. "Oh," she cried, "you don't understand how a woman feels about that! I'd rather die. I--I _couldn't_!"

"You _won't_."

"I thought _you_ understood me better. I thought _you_ wanted me to be happy!"

"Upon my soul, Lucy, I think that you might find happiness that way."

She shrugged her shoulders and her face looked hard as marble. "And that's your advice!" she said. And then with a sudden change of expression, "It's what you think I _ought_ to do. Would it please you if I took your advice? Is it what you _want_ me to do?"

I had spoken as I thought duty commanded. It hadn't been easy. With each word I felt that I had lost ground in her estimation. She asked that last question with the expression of a weary woebegone child, and I answered it without thought, and upon the urge of a wrong impulse.

"No--no," I cried. "It's not what I want you to do. I had almost rather see you dead."

There was a long silence.

"Do you mean that?"

"Yes, Lucy. Yes."