SO at length I yielded to repeated invitations, and made up my mind to visit the Vernons again. And it was in June. I had not been for nearly two years. The last visit was in the month of August: I remembered it too well—that year, that month, that day!

Under the most favourable circumstances, it needs enterprise and energy for a Londoner to pay a week-end visit to a friend’s house in the country. No matter how intimate the friend—and the Vernons, though charming and full of good nature, were not really very intimate friends of mine—there is always an element of risk in the affair; I will go further and say an element of preliminary unpleasantness. It means the disarrangement of regular habits; it means packing one’s bag and lugging it into a hansom; it means a train-journey; it often means a drive at the other end; it means sleeping in a strange bed and finding a suitable hook for one’s razor strop the next morning; it means accommodating oneself to a new social atmosphere, and the expenditure of much formal politeness. And suppose some hitch occurs—some trifling contretemps to ruffle the smoothness of the hours—where are you then? You are bound to sit tight and smile till Monday, and at parting to enlarge on your sorrow that the visit is over, all the while feeling intensely relieved; and you have got nothing in exchange for your discomfort and inconvenience save the satisfaction of duty done—a poor return, I venture to add. You know you have wasted a week-end, an irrecoverable week-end of eternity.

However, I boarded the train at St. Pancras in a fairly cheerful mood, and I tried to look on the bright side of life. The afternoon was certainly beautiful, and the train not too crowded, and I derived some pleasure, too, from the contemplation of a new pair of American boots which I had recently purchased. I remembered that Mrs. Vernon used to accuse me of a slight foppishness in the matter of boots, at the same time wishing audibly (in his hearing) that Jack would give a little more attention to the lower portions of his toilet; Jack was a sportsman, and her husband. And I thought of their roomy and comfortable house on the side of the long slope to Bedbury, and of their orchard and the hammocks under the trees in the orchard, and of tea and cakes being brought out to those hammocks, and of the sunsets over the Delectable Mountains (we always called them the Delectable Mountains because they are the identical hills which Bunyan had in mind when he wrote “The Pilgrim’s Progress”), and of Jack’s easy drawl and Mrs. Vernon’s chatter, and the barking of the dogs, and the stamping of the horses in the stable. And I actually thought: This will be a pleasant change after London.

“I do hope they won’t be awkward and self-conscious,” I said to myself. “And I also must try not to be.”

You see I was thinking of that last visit and what occurred during it. I was engaged to be married then, to a girl named Lucy Wren. Just as I had arrived at the Vernons’ house in their dog-cart the highly rural postman came up in his cart, and after delivering some letters produced still another letter and asked if anyone of the name of Bostock was staying there. I took the letter: the address was in Lucy’s handwriting (I had seen her only on the previous night, and of course she knew of my visit). I read the letter, standing there in the garden near the front door, and having read it I laughed loudly and handed it to Mrs. Vernon, saying: “What do you think of that for a letter?” In the letter Lucy said that she had decided to jilt me (she didn’t use those words—oh no!), and that on the following day she was going to be married to another man. Yes, that was a cheerful visit I paid to the Vernons, that August! At first I didn’t know what I was doing. They soothed me, calmed me. They did their best. It wasn’t their fault after all. They suggested I should run back to town and see Lucy; Jack offered to go with me. (Jack!) I declined. I declined to do anything. I ate hearty meals. I insisted on our usual excursions. I talked a lot. I forced them to pretend that nothing had happened. And on Monday morning I went off with a cold smile. But it was awful. It stood between me and the Vernons for a long time, a terrible memory. And when next Mrs. Vernon encountered me, in London, there were tears in her eyes and she was speechless.

Now you will understand better why I said to myself, with much sincerity: “I do hope they won’t be awkward and self-conscious. And I also must try not to be.”

As the train approached Bedbury I had qualms. I had qualms about the advisability of this visit to the Vernons. How could it possibly succeed, with that memory stalking like a ghost in the garden near the front door of their delightful and hospitable house? How could——? Then we rumbled over the familiar bridge, and I saw the familiar station yard, and the familiar dog-cart, and the familiar Dalmatian dog, and the familiar white mare that was rather young and skittish when Lucy jilted me. “That mare must be rising seven now,” I thought, “and settled down in life.”

I descried Mrs. Vernon waiting on the platform to welcome me, with the twins. Alas! I had forgotten the twins, those charming and frail little girls always dressed alike. Invariably, on my previous visits, I had brought something for the twins—a toy, a box of sweets, a couple of bead necklaces. Never once had I omitted to lay my tribute on the altar of their adorable infancy. And now I had forgotten, and my forgetfulness saddened me, because I knew that it would sadden them; they would expect, and they would be disappointed; they would taste the bitterness of life. “My poor little dears!” I thought, as they smiled and shouted, to see my head out of the carriage window, “I feel for you deeply.”

This beginning was a bad one. Like all men who have suffered without having deserved to suffer, I was superstitious, and I felt that the beginning augured ill. I resigned myself, even before the train had quite stopped, to a constrained and bored week-end with the Vernons.

“Well?” I exclaimed, with an affectation of jollity, descending from the carriage.

“Well?” responded Mrs. Vernon, with the same affectation.

It was lamentable, simply lamentable, the way in which that tragic memory stood between us and prevented either of us from showing a true, natural, simple self to the other. Mrs. Vernon could say little; I could say little; and what we did say was said stiffly, clumsily. Perhaps it was fortunate, on the whole, that the twins were present. They at any rate were natural and self-possessed.

“And how old are you now?” I asked them.

“We are seven,” they answered politely in their high, thin voices.

“Then you are like the little girl’s family in Wordsworth’s poem,” I remarked.

It was astonishing how this really rather good joke fell flat. Of course the twins did not see it. But Mrs. Vernon herself did not see it, and I too thought it, at the moment, inexpressibly feeble. As for the twins they could not hide their disappointment. Always before, I had handed them a little parcel, immediately, either at the station if they came to meet me, or at the house-door, if they did not. And to-day I had no little parcel. I could perceive that they were hoping against hope, even yet. I could perceive that they were saying to each other with their large, expressive eyes: “Perhaps he has put it in his portmanteau this time. He can’t have forgotten us.”

I could have wept for them. (I was in that state.) But I could not for the life of me tell them outright that I had forgotten the customary gift, and that I should send it by post on my return. No, I could not do that. I was too constrained, too ill at ease. So we all climbed up into the dog-cart. Mrs. Vernon and I in front, and the twins behind with the portmanteau to make weight; and the white mare set off with a bound, and the Dalmatian barked joyously, and we all pretended to be as joyous as the dog.

“Where’s Jack?” I inquired.

“Oh!” said Mrs. Vernon, as though I had startled her. “He had to go to Bedbury Sands to look at a couple of greyhounds—it would have been too late on Monday. I’m afraid he won’t be back for tea.”

I guessed instantly that, with the average man’s cowardice, he had run away in order to escape meeting me as I entered the house. He had left that to his wife. No doubt he hoped that by the time he returned I should have settled down and the first awkwardness and constraint would be past.

We said scarcely anything else, Mrs. Vernon and I, during the three-mile drive. And it was in silence that we crossed the portal of the house. Instead of having tea in the orchard we had it in the drawing-room, the twins being present. And the tea might have been a funeral feast.“Well,” I thought, “I anticipated a certain mutual diffidence, but nothing so bad as this. If they couldn’t be brighter than this, why in heaven’s name did they force me to come down?”

Mrs. Vernon was decidedly in a pitiable condition. She felt for me so much that I felt for her.

“Come along, dears,” she said to the twins, after tea was over, and the tea-things cleared away. And she took the children out of the room. But before leaving she handed me a note, in silence. I opened it and read: “Be as kind to her as you can; she has suffered a great deal.”

Then, ere I had time to think, the door, which Mrs. Vernon had softly closed, was softly opened, and a woman entered. It was Lucy, once Lucy Wren. She was as beautiful as ever, and no older. But her face was the face of one who had learnt the meaning of life. Till that moment I had sought everywhere for reasons to condemn her conduct towards me, to intensify its wickedness. Now, suddenly, I began to seek everywhere for reasons to excuse her. She had been so young, so guileless, so ignorant. I had been too stern for her. I had frightened her. How could she be expected to know that the man who had supplanted me was worthless? She had acted as she did partly from youthful foolishness and partly from timidity. She had been in a quandary. She had lost her head. And so it had occurred that one night, that night in August, she had kissed me falsely, with a lie on her lips, knowing that her jilting letter was already in the post. What pangs she must have experienced then! Yes, as she entered the room and gazed at me with her blue eyes, my heart overflowed with genuine sorrow for her.

“Lucy!” I murmured, “you are in mourning!”

“Yes,” she said. “Didn’t you know? Has Mrs. Vernon said nothing? He is dead.”

And she sank down by the side of my chair and hid her face, and I could only see her honey-coloured hair. I stroked it. I knew all her history, in that supreme moment, without a word of explanation. I knew that she had been self-deceived, that she had been through many an agony, that she had always loved me.... And she was so young, so young.

I kissed her hair.

“How thankful I am!” breathed Mrs. Vernon afterwards. “Suppose it had not turned out well!”

Jack Vernon had calculated with some skill. When he came back, the constraint, the diffidence, was at an end.