"Then I will," said Lucy, "when I see a man trying to do his duty like a man, I help him always, and besides you dance like a breeze."

So they went away together, he apologizing and she teasing.

"How about me?" I said to Evelyn. "Is it my turn?"

"No," she said, "it isn't. I want to talk to you."

I sat down facing her in the chair that Dawson Cooper had occupied.

"Just now," she said, "when you and Lucy went outside, I heard someone say to someone else----"

"Hadn't they any names?"

"No. She said to him, 'It's about time John Fulton came back. Lucy's making a fool of herself.'"

Somehow I seemed to turn all cold inside.

"Of course," said Evelyn, "Lucy knows and you know and I know, but the man in the street who sees you ride out together day after day, and the woman who's no particular friend of yours, who sees you dance dance after dance together--_they_ don't know. Aiken is a small place, but like the night, it has a thousand eyes, and as many idle tongues. If I didn't know Lucy so well, and you so well, I'd be a little worried."

"Why," I said, "it's a golf year. n.o.body would rather ride, except Lucy and me."

"The reason doesn't matter," said Evelyn. "When two young people are together a whole lot, their feelings don't stand still. They either get to like each other less and less, or more and more. You and Lucy don't like each other less and less. Anybody can see that, so it must be more and more. And there's always danger in that. Isn't there?"

I thought for a moment, and then said: "Not for her, certainly."

"You knew Lucy when she was a little girl, but you didn't see her often when she was growing up, did you? Her best friend never thought that she would ever settle to any one man. She was the most outrageous little flirt you ever saw. No, not outrageous, because each time she thought she was really in love herself. It was one boy after another, all crazy about her, and she about them. Then it was one man after another. What Lucy doesn't know about moonlight and verandas, and the sad sounds of the sea at night, isn't worth knowing. But all the time, from the time she was fifteen, there was John Fulton in the background.

He was never first favorite till she actually accepted him and married him, but he was always in the running, in second or third place, and whether he won her down by faithfulness and devotion n.o.body knows.

n.o.body quite knows how or why she changed toward him. I don't believe she does. He was just about the last man anybody thought she'd marry.

But anyway her young and flighty affections got round to him at last, and fastened to him. They fastened to him like leeches. No man was ever loved as hard as she loved him when she got round to it. She made up for all the sorry dances she'd led him. She was absolutely shameless. She made love to him in public, she----"

"She still does, Evelyn," I said. "I think that's one reason why I like her so much, and him. There's n.o.body else so frank and natural about their feelings for each other. Why, it's beautiful to see."

"Archie," said Evelyn, "for short periods of time she loved some of the men she didn't marry almost as hard."

After a moment's silence, she said with hesitation,

"It's a lucky thing for her that all the men she thought she cared about were gentlemen. You must have noticed yourself how little yesterday means to her, how less than nothing tomorrow means, until it becomes today."

"Well," I said, "it all bolls down to this, that after many vicissitudes, she found her Paradise at last."

"Who can be sure that a girl who had as many love affairs as she had is--all through!"

Just then Dawson Cooper came back and took Evelyn away with him. I was immensely interested in all that she had told me about Lucy. I rather wished that I might, for a while, have been one of the many. And I was annoyed to learn that people were undertaking to make our business theirs.

"I'll tell John about it when he comes back," I said, "and if he thinks best, why I won't see so much of her."

But when he came back it did not seem worth while to tell him.

X

I had forgotten that John Fulton was to return Monday, until Lucy gave it as a reason for not being able to ride on that afternoon.

"Even if the train is on time," she said, "I don't think I ought to go chasing off, do you? He'd like us all to be at home together and maybe later he'd like me to take him for a little drive."

She was rather solemn for Lucy. I did not in the least gather that she would rather ride with me than play around with her husband. I did gather that she was not using her own wishes and preferences as an excuse, but the physical fact of John's home-coming. And I learned in the same moment that I wished his return might be indefinitely postponed, and that Monday afternoon with no Lucy to ride with promised to be a bore.

I saw her doing ch.o.r.es in the village, Jock and Hurry crowded into the seat beside her, just before the arrival of the New York train. From the back of the runabout dangled the reed-like, moth-eaten legs of Cornelius Twombley. For him, too, the return of the master was a joyous occasion; there would be a quarter for him if he had been a good boy, and some inner voice evidently was telling him that he had. There was a red-and-white-striped camellia in his b.u.t.tonhole, and his narrow body was beautified by a dirty white waistcoat.

The New York train whistled. Lucy flicked the horse with the whip, three handsome hatless heads were jerked backward, Cornelius Twombley's peanut-shaped head was jerked forward, the voices of Jock and Hurry made noises like excited tree frogs, and away they all flew toward the station.

It was easy to picture the beaming faces that John Fulton could see when he got off the train; it was [Transcriber's note: two words obliterated here] hear the happy joyous voices all going at once, that would greet him. If there was trouble in his life he would forget it in those moments.

I turned into the Aiken Club feeling a little lonely. How good, I thought, it would be to be met, even once, as Fulton is being met.

And now I must set down things that I did not know at this time, and only found out afterward. And other things that are only approximately true, things that wouldn't happen in my presence, but which I am very sure must have happened.

When Lucy drove off at such a reckless pace to get to the station before the train, I don't think it even occurred to her that during his absence her feelings for her husband had changed in any way. It was he, I think, who was the first to know that there was a change. He did not realize it at the station or on the way home. How could he with Jock and Hurry piled in his lap, and both talking two-forty, and Lucy at his side, trying to make herself heard and even understood? No man could. It must have been shortly after he got home, at that moment, indeed, when he was alone with her, and his arms went out to her with all the love and yearning acc.u.mulated at compound interest during absence. Habit, and the wish to hurt no one, must have carried her arms to tighten a little about him, and to lift her lips to him. Then I think she must have turned her head a little, so that it was only her cheek that he kissed. I imagine that until that time Fulton's love-making had always found the swiftest response, that with those two pa.s.sion had always been as mutual and spontaneous as pa.s.sion can be; and that now, perhaps the very first time, his fire met with that which it could not kindle into answering flame.

I do not think that he at once let her go. I think that first his arms that held her so close loosened (already the pressure had all gone out of hers). I think she was sorry they had to loosen, and glad that they had. Then his arms must have dropped to his sides. He did not at once turn away, but kept on looking at her, as she at him--he, hurt, he did not know why, but br.i.m.m.i.n.g with love and compa.s.sion and tenderness and a little desperate with the effort to understand and to make allowances for whatever might have to be understood. Her great blue eyes looked almost black for once, prayer upon prayer was in their depths, they were steady upon his and unfaltering. It was as if she was giving him every opportunity to look down through them and see what was in her soul.

It could not have been till many days later that a whole sequence of episodes which hurt and could not be understood forced him into speech.

I think he must suddenly in a moment of trial, have come out with something like this:

"Why, Lucy, it sometimes seems as if you didn't love me any more."

When she didn't answer, it must have flashed through him like a streak of ice-cold lightning that perhaps she really didn't.

I am glad that it is only in imagination that I can hear his next question and her answer. There must have been a something in his voice from which the most callous-hearted would have wished to run, as from the deathbed of a little child.

"_Don't_ you, Lucy?"

And how terribly it must have hurt her to answer that question!

Considering what he had been to her and she to him, for how long a period of time neither had been able to see anything in this world beyond the other, and considering with even more weight than these things their own children for whom the feelings of neither could ever really change, I think that Lucy ought to have lied. I think she ought to have lied with all her might and main, lied as John Fulton would have lied if the situation had been reversed, and that thereafter, until his death or hers, she ought to have acted those lies, with unflagging fervor and patience. Tenderness for him she never lost.

She might, upon that foundation, have built a saintly edifice of simulated love and pa.s.sion.

But it was not in her nature to lie. I think she probably said: "I don't know. I'm afraid not." And then I think her sad face must have begun to pucker like that of a little child going to cry, and I think it is very likely, so strong is habit, that she then hurried into her husband's arms and had her cry upon his breast.

XI

I imagine that thereafter for a time John Fulton's att.i.tude toward Lucy was now dignified and manly, and now almost childlike in its despair.

Having made her love him once, he must have felt at first that he could make her love him again. I imagine him making love to her with all the chivalry and poetry that was in him, and then breaking off short to rail against fate, against the whole treacherous race of women, perhaps, and to ask what he had done to deserve so much suffering?

"Why didn't you do this to me when I was proposing? Why did you wait till I was stone broke and worried half sick, with everything going from bad to worse? Is it anything I've done, anything I've failed to do? Why, Lucy, we were such a model of happiness that people looked up to us. How can anybody suddenly stop caring the way you have? If it had been gradual! But you were in love with me the night I went away, weren't you? _Weren't_ you?"

Here he catches her shoulders and forces that one admission from her, and makes the great praying woebegone eyes meet his. Then, almost, he pushes her away from him.