Title: The Courting Of Lady Jane
Author: Bacon, Josephine Daskam
Language: English
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THE COURTING OF LADY JANE

By Josephine Daskam

Copyright, 1903, by Charles Scribner’s Sons


The colonel entered his sister’s room abruptly, sat down on her bed, and
scattered a drawerful of fluffy things laid out for packing.

“You don’t seem to think about my side of the matter,” he said gloomily.
“What am I to do here all alone, for Heaven’s sake?”

“That is so like a man,” she murmured, one arm in a trunk. “Let me see:
party-boots, the children’s arctics, Dick’s sweater--did you think I
could live here forever, Cal?”

“Then you shouldn’t have come at all. Just as I get thoroughly settled
down to flowers in the drawing-room, and rabbits in a chafing-dish, and
people for dinner, you skip off. Why don’t you bring the children here?
What did you marry into the navy for, anyway? Nagasaki! I wouldn’t live
in a place called Nagasaki for all that money could buy!”

“You’re cross,” said Mrs. Dick placidly. “Please get off that
bath-wrapper. If you don’t like to live alone--Six bath-towels, Dick’s
shoe-bag, my old muff (I hope and pray I’ll remember that!) Helen’s
reefer--Why don’t you marry?”

“Marry? Marry! Are you out of your mind, Dosia? I marry!”

The colonel twisted his grayish mustache into points; a look of horror
spread over his countenance.

“Men have done it,” she replied seriously, “and lived. Look at Dick.”

“Look at him? But how? Who ever sees him? I’ve ceased to believe in him,
personally. I can’t look across the Pacific. Consider my age, Dosia;
consider my pepper-and-salt hair; consider my bronchitis; consider--”

“Consider your stupidity! As to your hair, I should hate to eat a salad
dressed with that proportion of pepper. As to your age, remember you’re
only ten years ahead of me, and I expect to remain thirty-eight for some
time.”

“But forty-eight is centenarian to a girl of twenty-two, Dosia.”

The colonel was plaiting and un-plaiting the ball-fringe of the
bed-slip; his eyes followed the motion of his fingers--he did not see
his sister’s triumphant smile as she dived again into the trunk.

“That depends entirely on the girl. Take Louise Morris, for instance;
she regards you as partly entombed, probably”--the colonel winced
involuntarily--“but, on the other hand, a girl like Jane Leroy would
have no such nonsense in her head, and she can’t be much more than
twenty.”

“She is twenty-two,” cried the unsuspecting colonel eagerly.

“Ah? I should not have said so much. Now such a girl as that, Cal,
handsome, dignified, college-bred, is just the wife for an older man.
One can’t seem to see her marrying some young snip of her own age. She’d
be wasted on him. I happen to know that she refused Wilbur Vail entirely
on that ground. She admitted that he was a charming fellow, but she told
her mother he was far too young for her. And he was twenty-eight.”

“Did she?” The colonel left the fringe. “But--but perhaps there were
other reasons; perhaps she didn’t--”

“Oh, probably she didn’t. But still, she said he was too young. That’s
the way with these serious girls. Now I thought Dick was middle-aged
when I married him, and he was thirty. Jane doesn’t take after her
mother; she was only nineteen when she was born--I mean, of course, when
Jane was born. Will you hand me that crocheted shawl, please?”

“My dear girl, you’re not going to try to get that into that trunk, too?
Something will break.”

“Not at all, my dear Clarence. Thank you. Will you send Norah up to me
as you go down?”

It had not occurred to the colonel that he was going down, but he
decided that he must have been, and departed, forgetting Norah utterly
before he had accomplished half of the staircase.

He wandered out through the broad hall, reaching down a hat absently,
and across the piazza. Then, half unconscious of direction, he crossed
the neat suburban road and strolled up the gravel path of the cottage
opposite. Mrs. Leroy was sitting in the bay-window, attaching indefinite
yards of white lace to indefinite yards of white ruffles. Jane, in cool
violet lawn, was reading aloud to her. Both looked up at his light knock
at the side door.

“But I am afraid I interrupt,” he suggested politely, as he dropped
into a low chair with a manner that betokened the assurance of a warm
welcome.

“Not the least in the world,” Mrs. Leroy smiled whimsically.

“Lady is reading Pater to me for the good of my soul, and I am listening
politely for the good of her manners,” she answered. “But it is a little
wearing for us both, for she knows I don’t understand it, and I know she
thinks me a little dishonest for pretending to.”

“Mother!”

The girl’s gray eyes opened wide above her cool, creamy cheeks; the
deep dimples that made her mother’s face so girlish actually added a
regularity and seriousness to the daughter’s soft chin. Her chestnut
hair was thick and straight, the little half-curls of the same rich tint
that fell over her mother’s forehead brushed wavelessly back on each
side of a deep widow’s peak.

The two older ones laughed.

“Always uncompromising, Lady Jane!” the colonel cried.

“I assure you, colonel, when Lady begins to mark iniquities, few of us
stand!”

Jane smiled gravely, as on two children. “You know very well that is
nonsense,” she said.

Black Hannah appeared in the door, beaming and curtsying to the colonel.

“You-all ready foh yoh tea, Miss Lady?” she inquired.

A sudden recollection threw Mrs. Leroy into one of her irresistible fits
of gentle laughter.

“Oh, Lady,” she murmured, “do you remember that impossible creature that
lectured me about Hannah’s asking you for orders? Did I tell you about
it, colonel?”

Jane shook her head reprovingly.

“Now, mother dearest, you always make him out worse--”

“Worse, my darling? Worse is a word that couldn’t be applied to that
man. Worse is comparative. Positive he certainly was, superlative is
mild, but comparative--never!”

“Tell about it, do,” begged the guest.

“Well, he came to see how Lady was growing up--he’s a sort of species of
relative--and he sat in your chair, colonel, and talked the most amazing
Fourth Reader platitudes in a deep bass voice. And when Hannah asked
Lady what her orders were for the grocer, he gave me a terrible look and
rumbled out: ‘I am grieved to see, Cousin Alice, that Jennie has burst
her bounds!’

“It sounded horribly indecorous--I expected to see her in fragments on
the floor--and I fairly gasped.”

“Gasped, mother? You laughed in his face!”

“Did I, dearest? It is possible.” Mrs. Leroy admitted. “And when I
looked vague he explained, ‘I mean that you seem to have relinquished
the reins very early, Cousin Alice!’

“‘Relinquished? Relinquished?’ said I. ‘Why, dear me, Mr. Wadham, I
never held ‘em!’”

“He only meant, mother dear, that--”

“Bless you, my child, I know what he only meant! He explained it to
me very fully. He meant that when a widow is left with a ten-year-old
child, she should apply to distant cousins to manage her and her funds.”

“Disgusting beast!” the colonel exclaimed with feeling, possessing
himself of one of Hannah’s beaten biscuits, and smiling as Lady Jane’s
white fingers dropped just the right number of lumps in his tea.

How charming she was, how dignified, how tender to her merry little
mother, this grave, handsome girl! He saw her, in fancy, opposite him at
his table, moving so stately about his big empty house, filling it with
pretty, useless woman’s things, lighting every corner with that last
touch of grace that the most faithful housekeeper could never hope to
add to his lonely life. For Theodosia had taught him that he was lonely.
He envied Dick this sister of his.

He wondered that marriage had never occurred to him before: simply it
had not. Ever since that rainy day in April, twenty years ago, when
they had buried the slender, soft-eyed little creature with his twisted
silver ring on her cold finger, he had shut that door of life; and
though it had been many years since the little ring had really bound him
to a personality long faded from his mind, he had never thought to open
the door--he had forgotten it was there.

He was not a talkative man, and, like many such, he dearly loved to be
amused and entertained by others who were in any degree attractive to
him. The picture of these two dear women adding their wit and charm and
dainty way of living to his days grew suddenly very vivid to him; he
realized that it was an unconscious counting on their continued interest
and hospitality that had made the future so comfortable for so long.

With characteristic directness he began:

“Will your Ladyship allow me a half-hour of business with the
queen-mother?”

She rose easily and stepped out through the long window to the little
side porch, then to the lawn. They watched her as she paced slowly away
from them, a tall violet figure vivid against all the green.

“She is a dear girl, isn’t she?” said her mother softly.

A sudden flood of delighted pride surged through the colonel’s heart.
If only he might keep them happy and contented and--and his! He never
thought of them apart: no rose and bud on one stem were more essentially
together than they.

“She is too dear for one to be satisfied forever with even our charming
neighborliness,” he answered gravely. “How long have we lived ‘across
the street from each other,’ as they say here, Mrs. Leroy?”

She did not raise her eyes from her white ruffles.

“It is just a year this month,” she said.

“We are such good friends,” he continued in his gentle, reserved voice,
“that I hesitate to break into such pleasant relations, even with
the chance of making us all happier, perhaps. But I cannot resist the
temptation. Could we not make one family, we three?”

A quick, warm color flooded her cheeks and forehead. She caught her
breath; her startled eyes met his with a lightning-swift flash of
something that moved him strangely.

“What do you mean, Colonel Driscoll?” she asked, low and quickly.

“I mean, could you give me your daughter--if she--at any time--could
think it possible?”

She drew a deep breath; the color seemed blown from her transparent skin
like a flame from a lamp. For a moment her head seemed to droop; then
she sat straight and moistened her lips, her eyes fixed level ahead.

“Lady?” she whispered, and he was sure that she thought the word was
spoken in her ordinary tone. “Lady?”

“I know--I realize perfectly that it is a presumption in me--at my
age--when I think of what she deserves. Oh, we won’t speak of it again
if you feel that it would be wrong!”

“No, no, it is not that,” she murmured. “I--I have always known that I
must lose her; but she--one is so selfish--she is all I have, you know!”

“But you would not lose her!” he cried eagerly. “You would only share
her with me, dear Mrs. Leroy! Do you think--could she--it is possible?”

“Lady is an unusual girl,” she said evenly, but with something gone out
of her warm, gay voice. “She has never cared for young people. I know
that she admires you greatly. While I cannot deny that I should prefer
less difference than lies between your ages, it would be folly in me to
fail to recognize the desirability of the connection in every other
way. Whatever her decision--and the matter rests entirely with her--my
daughter and I are honored by your proposal, Colonel Driscoll.”

She might have been reading a carefully prepared address: her eyes never
wavered from the wall in front--it was as if she saw her words there.

“Then--then will you ask her?”

She stared at him now.

“You mean that you wish me to ask her to marry you?”

“Yes,” he said simply. “She will feel freer in that way. You will know
as I should not, directly, if there is any chance. I can talk about it
with you more easily--somehow.”

She shrugged her shoulders with a strange air of exhaustion; it was the
yielding of one too tired to argue.

“Very well,” she breathed, “go now, and I will ask her. Come this
evening. You will excuse--”

She made a vague motion. The colonel pitied her tremendously in a blind
way. Was it all this to lose a daughter? How she loved her!

“Perhaps to-morrow morning,” he suggested, but she shook her head
vehemently.

“No, to-night, to-night!” she cried. “Lady will know directly. Come
tonight!”

He went out a little depressed. Already a tiny cloud hung between them.
Suppose their pleasant waters had been troubled for worse than nothing?
Suddenly his case appeared hopeless to him. What folly--a man of his
years, and that fresh young creature with all her life before her! He
wondered that he could have dreamed of it; he wished the evening over
and the foolish mistake forgiven.

His sister was full of plans and dates, and her talk covered his almost
absolute silence. After dinner she retired again into packing, and he
strode through the dusk to the cottage; his had not been a training that
seeks to delay the inevitable.

The two women sat, as usual at this hour, on the porch. Their white
gowns shimmered against the dark honeysuckle-vine. He halted at the
steps and took off the old fatigue-cap he sometimes wore, standing
straight and tall before them.

Mrs. Leroy leaned back in her chair; the faintest possible gesture
indicated her daughter, who had risen and stood beside her.

“Colonel Driscoll,” she said in a low, uneven voice, “my daughter wishes
me to say to you that she appreciates deeply the honor you do her, and
that if you wish it she will be your wife. She--she is sure she will be
happy.”

The colonel felt his heart leap up and hit heavily against his chest.
Was it possible? A great gratitude and pride glowed softly through him.
He walked nearly up the steps and stood just below her, lifting her hand
to his lips.

“My dear, dear child,” he said slowly, “you give me too much, but you
must not measure my thankfulness for the gift by my deserts. Whatever a
man can do to make you and your mother happy shall be done so long as I
live.”

She smiled gravely into his eyes and bowed her head slightly; like all
her little motions, it had the effect of a graceful ceremony. Then,
slipping loose her hand, she seated herself on a low stool beside her
mother’s chair, leaning against her knee. Her sweet silence charmed him.

He took his accustomed seat, and they sat quietly, while the breeze
puffed little gusts of honeysuckle across their faces. Occasional
neighbors greeted them, strolling past; the newly watered lawns all
along the street sent up a fresh turfy odor; now and then a bird chirped
drowsily. He felt deliriously intimate, peacefully at home. A fine,
subtle sense of _bien-être_ penetrated his whole soul.

When he rose to go they had hardly exchanged a dozen words. As he held,
her hand closely, half doubting his right, she raised her face to him
simply, and he kissed her white forehead. When he bent over her mother’s
hand it was as cold as stone.

Through the long pleasant weeks of the summer they talked and laughed
and drove and sailed together, a happy trio. Mrs. Leroy’s listless
quiet of the first few days gave way to a brilliant, fitful gayety that
enchanted the more silent two, and the few hours when she was not with
them seemed incomplete. On his mentioning this to her one afternoon she
shot him a strange glance.

“But this is all wrong,” she said abruptly. “What will you do when I am
gone in the winter?”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “Gone where, when, how?”

“My dear colonel,” she said lightly, but with an obvious effort, “do
you imagine that I cannot leave you a honeymoon, in spite of my doting
parenthood? I plan to spend the latter part of the winter in New York
with friends. Perhaps by spring--”

“My dear Mrs. Leroy, how absurd! How cruel of you! What will Lady do?
What shall I do? She has never been separated from you in her life. Does
she know of this?”

“No; I shall tell her soon. As for what she will do--she will have her
husband. If that is not enough for her, she should not marry the man who
cannot--”

She stopped suddenly and controlled with great effort a rising emotion
almost too strong for her. Again a deep, inexplicable sympathy welled up
in him. He longed to comfort her, to give her everything she wanted. He
blamed himself and Jane for all the trouble they were causing her.

That afternoon she kept in her room, and he and his fiancée drank
their tea together alone. He was worried by the news of the morning,
dissatisfied out of all proportion, vexed that so sensible and natural
a proposition should leave him so uneasy and disappointed. He had
meant the smooth, quiet life to go on without a break, and now the new
relation must change everything.

He glanced at Jane, a little irritated that she should not perceive
his mood and exorcise it. But she had not her mother’s marvellous
susceptibility. She drank her tea in serene silence. He made a few
haphazard remarks, hoping to lose in conversation the cloud that
threatened his evening; but she only assented tranquilly and watched the
changing colors of the early sunset.

“Have you made a vow to agree with everything I say?” he asked finally,
half laughing, half in earnest.

“Not at all,” she replied placidly, “but you surely do not want an
argument?”

“Oh, no,” he answered her, vexed at himself.

“What do you think of Mrs. ------‘s novel?” he suggested, as the pages,
fluttering in the rising breeze, caught his attention.

“Mother is reading it, not I,” she returned indifferently. “I don’t care
very much for the new novels.”

Involuntarily he turned as if to catch her mother’s criticism of the
book: light, perhaps, but witty, and with a little tang of harmless
satire that always took his fancy. But she was not there. He sighed
impatiently; was it possible he was a little bored?

A quick step sounded on the gravel walk, a swish of skirts.

“It is Louise Morris,” she said, “I’ll meet her at the gate.”

After a short conference she returned.

“Will you excuse me, please?” she said, quite eagerly for her. “Mother
will be down soon, anyway, I am sure. Louise’s brother is back; he has
been away in the West for six years. Mother will be delighted--she was
always so fond of Jack. Louise is making a little surprise for him. He
must be quite grown up now. I’ll go and tell mother.”

A moment later and she was gone. Mrs. Leroy took her place in the
window, and imperceptibly under her gentle influence the cloud faded
from his horizon; he forgot the doubt of an hour ago. At her suggestion
he dined there, and found himself, as always when with his hostess, at
his best. He felt that there was no hypocrisy in her interest in his
ideas, and the ease with which he expressed them astonished him even
while he delighted in it. Why could he not talk so with Jane? It
occurred to him suddenly that it was because Jane herself talked rarely.
She was, like him, a listener, for the most part. His mind, unusually
alert and sensitive to-night, looked ahead to the happy winter evenings
he had grown to count on so, and when, with an effort, he detached
this third figure from the group to be so closely allied after
Christmas-tide--the date fixed for the wedding--he perceived that there
was a great gap in the picture, that the warmth and sparkle had suddenly
gone. All the tenderness in the world could not disguise that flash of
foresight.

He grew quiet, lost in revery. She, following his mood, spoke less and
less; and when Jane returned, late at night, escorted by a tall, bronzed
young ranchman, she found them sitting in silence in a half-light,
staring into the late September fire on the hearth.

In the month that followed an imperceptible change crept over the three.
The older woman was much alone--variable as an April day, now merry and
caressing, now sombre and withdrawn. The girl clung to her mother more
closely, sat for long minutes holding her hand, threw strange glances at
her betrothed that would have startled him, so different were they
from her old, steady regard, had not his now troubled sense of some
impalpable mist that wrapped them all grown stronger every day. He
avoided sitting alone with her, wondering sometimes at the ease
with which such tête-à-têtes were dispensed with. Then, struck with
apprehension at his seeming neglect, he spent his ingenuity in delicate
attentions toward her, courtly thoughtfulness of her tastes, beautiful
gifts that provoked from her, in turn, all the little intimacies and
tender friendliness of their earlier intercourse.

At one of these tiny crises of mutual restoration, she, sitting alone
with him in the drawing-room, suddenly raised her eyes and looked
steadily at him.

“You care for me, then, very much?” she said earnestly. “You--you would
miss--if things were different? You really count on--on--our marriage?
Are you happy?”

A great remorse rose in him. Poor child--poor, young, unknowing
creature, that, after all, was only twenty-two! She felt it, then, the
strange mist that seemed to muffle his words and actions, to hold him
back. And she had given him so much!

He took her hands and drew her to him.

“My dear, dear child,” he said gently, “forgive a selfish middle-aged
bachelor if he cannot come up to the precious ideals of the sweetest
girlhood in the world! I am no more worthy of you, Lady dear, than
I have ever been, but I have never felt more tender toward you, more
sensible of all you are giving me. I cannot pretend to the wild love of
the poets you read so much; that time, if it ever was, is past for me.
I am a plain, unromantic person, who takes and leaves a great deal for
granted--I thought you knew that. But you must never doubt--” He paused
a moment, and for the first time she interrupted him nervously.

“I never will--Clarence,” she said almost solemnly; and it struck him
for the first time that she had never called him by his name before. He
leaned over her, and as in one of her rare concessions she lifted her
face up to him, he bent lower than her forehead; what compelled him to
kiss her soft cheek rather than her lips he did not know.

Unexpected business summoned him to New York for a fortnight the next
day, and the great city drew him irresistibly into its noisy maelstrom.
The current of his thoughts changed absolutely. Old friends and new took
up his leisure. His affairs, as they grew more pressing, woke in him
a keen delight in the struggle with his opponents; as he shook hands
triumphantly with his lawyer after a well-earned victory he felt years
younger. He decided that he had moped too long in the country: “We must
move into town this season,” he said to himself.

He fairly ran up the cottage steps in the gathering dusk. He longed to
see them, full of plans for the winter. Hannah met him at the door:
the ladies had gone to a dance at the Morrises’; there had been an
invitation for him, so he would not intrude if he followed.

Hastily changing his clothes, he walked up the street. Lights and music
poured out of the open windows of the large house; the full moon made
the grounds about it almost as bright as the rooms. He stepped up on
the piazza and looked in at the swaying couples. Lady Jane, beautiful
in pale blue mull, drifted by in her young host’s arms. She was flushed
with dancing; her hair had escaped from its usual calm. He hardly
recognized her. As he looked out toward the old garden, he caught a
glimpse of a flowing white gown, a lace scarf thrown over a head whose
fine poise he could not mistake.

A young man passed him with a filmy crêpe shawl he knew well. The
colonel stepped along with him.

“You are taking this to Mrs. Leroy?”

“Yes, colonel, she feels the air a little.”

“Let me relieve you of it,” and he walked alone into the garden with the
softly scented cobweb over his arm.

She was standing in an old neglected summer-house, her back to the door.
As he stopped behind her and laid the soft wrap over her firm white
shoulders, she turned her head with a startled prescience of his
personality, and met his eyes full. He looked straight into those soft
gray depths, and as he looked, searching for something there, he knew
not what, troubled strangely by her nearness and the helpless surrender
of her fastened gaze, a great light burst upon him.

“It is you! it is you!” he said hoarsely, and crushing her in his arms,
he kissed her heavily on her yielding mouth.

For a moment she rested against him. The music, piercingly sweet, drove
away thought. Then she drew herself back, pushing him blindly from her.

“No, no, no!” she gasped, “it is Lady! You are mad--”

“Mad?” he said quickly. “I was never sane till now. When I think of what
I had to offer that dear child, when I realize to what a farce of love
I was sacrificing her--oh, Alice dearest, you are a woman; you must have
known!”

She raised her head; an unquenchable triumph smiled at him.

“I did know!” she cried exultantly. Suddenly her whole expression
changed, her head sank again.

“Oh, Lady, my child, my baby!” she moaned, all mother now, and
brokenhearted.

“You must never tell her, never!” she panted. “You will forget; you--I
will go away--”

“It is you who are mad, Alice,” he said sternly. “Listen to me. For all
these weeks it has been your voice I have remembered, your face I
have seen in imagination in my house. It is you I have missed from
us three--never Lady. It is you I have tried to please and hoped to
satisfy--not Lady. Ever since you told me you would not spend the winter
with us I have been discontented. Why, Alice, I have never kissed her in
my life--as I have kissed you.”

She grew red to the tips of her little ears, and threw him a quick
glance that tingled to his fingers’ ends.

“You would not have me--oh, my dear, it is not possible!” he cried.

She burst into tears. “I don’t know--I don’t know!” she sobbed. “It will
break her heart! I don’t understand her any more; once I could tell what
she would think, but not now.”

“Hush! some one is coming,” he warned her, and taking her arm he drew
her out through a great gap in the side of the little house, so that
they stood hidden by it.

“Then I will tell him to his face what I think of him!” said a young
man’s voice, angry, determined, but shaking with disappointment. “To
hold a girl--”

“He does not hold me--I hold myself!” It was Lady’s voice, low and
trembling. “It is all my fault, Jack. I bound myself before I knew
what--what a different thing it really was. I do love him--I love him
dearly, but not--not--No, no; I don’t mean what you think--or, if I do,
I must not. Jack, I have promised, don’t you see? And when I thought
that perhaps he didn’t care so much, and asked him--oh, I told you how
beautifully he answered me, I will never hurt him so, never!”

“It is disgusting, it is horrible; he is twenty-five years older than
you--he might be your father!” stormed the voice.

“I--I never cared for young people before!”

Could this be Lady, this shy, faltering girl? Moved by an overmastering
impulse, the man behind the summer-house turned his head and looked
through the broken wall.

Lady Jane was blushing and paling in quick succession: the waves of red
flooded over her moved face and receded like the tide at turn. Her eyes
were piteous; her hair fell low over her forehead; she looked incredibly
young.

“Of course,” said the young man bitterly, “it is a good match--a fine
match, You will have a beautiful home and everything you want.”

She put out her hands appealingly. “Oh, Jack, how can you hurt me so?
You know I would live with you in a garret--on the plains--”

“Then do it.”

“I shall never hurt a person so terribly to whom I have freely given my
word,” she said, with a touch of her old-time decision.

Colonel Driscoll felt his blood sweeping through his veins like wine. He
was far too excited for finesse, too eager--and he had been so willing
to wait, once!--for the next sweet moment when this almost tragedy
should be resolved into its elements. He strode out into the open space
in front of the little house.

“My dear young people,” he said, as they stared at him in absolute
silence, “I am, I am--” He had intended to carry the matter off
jocularly, but the sight of the girl’s tear-stained face and the emotion
of the minutes before had softened and awed him. His eyes seemed yet to
hold those gray ones; he felt strangely the pressure of that soft body
against his.

“Ah, my dear,” he said gently, “could you not believe me when I told you
that my one wish was to make you happy as long as I lived? Happiness is
not built on mistakes, and you must forgive us if we do not always allow
youth to monopolize them.

“She has always been like a dear child to me, Mr. Morris”--he turned to
the other man--“and you would never wish me to change my regard for her,
could you know it!

“Go with him, Lady dear, and forgive me if I have ever pained
you--believe me, I am very happy to-night.”

He raised her softly as she knelt before him weeping, and kissed her
hair.

“But there is nothing to forgive,” he assured her.

They went away hand in hand, happy, like two dazed children for whom
the sky has suddenly but not--because they are young--too miraculously
opened, and the shrubbery swallowed them.

He turned and strode back into the shadow. Mrs. Leroy sat crouching on
the fallen timber, her head still bent. Stooping behind her, he drew her
toward him.

“They have forgotten us by now,” he whispered, “can I make you forget
them?”





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