Inga had lied to him, and he had understood the reasons of her denial. Yet the fact remained that the first lie lay between them, the blade that cut ruthlessly through the veils of the summer’s illusion. Until then, he had lived in an unreal paradise. The world had been exiled, or, rather, from morning to night, in every mood of nature he had dominated where he had walked. There was a primitive directness, a savage charm about Inga that had carried him back to the healing savagery of the solitary world. Absorbed in the fulness of his artistic regeneration, falling into pleasant mental languor, an ease of the body and all the senses, he had forgotten in the quiet reveries of fire-lit evenings, that beyond the threshold there waited those irreconcilable enemies of the present—the haunted past and the inscrutable future. So completely did she blend into the roaming moods of his mind, so keenly intuitive of the moment to listen and the moment to dream that, at times, stretched indolently and gracefully before the roaring logs, she seemed to wait his pleasure with the mute loyalty of some friendly animal. Now, all at once, the spell had vanished.

He was a man alive to fierce, disturbing emotions, aware that, side by side with the blinding figure of passionate love, was that relentless, inevitable companion—primeval jealousy—exacting its ruthless toll for every narcotic moment of oblivion. She, too, was different, no longer the companion whose every word and every thought he possessed, but something that drew back from him before the clutching hunger of his soul, and veiled herself in the obscurity of the past—the eternal stranger—Woman.

He did not blame her—the crueler thing would have been to have told the truth. He felt this, and yet his whole nature rebelled against the intruder, which had crept in like weeds among the flowers. He could not speak to her; he could not meet her eyes. His own self seemed to have run away from him. He was incapable of rest or activity, and when she returned, he marveled at the calm in which she moved. The next day and the day after, something hot and red stood between his eyes and his canvas. He tried desperately to paint and remained bewildered by the void within him. He began a dozen sketches, swore, and scraped them out, and, after long, racking hours, remained with his head in his hands, staring at the terrifying white depth of his canvas that seemed to him to be something without end or beginning, a vast emptiness into which he had sunk all his hope.

The first day when she returned over the dripping rocks to join him for the long tramp home, she asked as usual:

“Good day?”

“No—nothing,” he said shortly.

The following morning when she appeared, she looked into his face once and asked no questions. They were silent during the walk, each curious of the other, keeping a little apart as though a thousand miles intervened between them. The evening had gone down in angry squalls and, across the white-lipped sea, the wind went scurrying in frantic flights. At their sides, the wakened sand-grasses writhed in fitful temper, hissing like disturbed serpents. Occasionally a whirlwind, turning along the beach, flung stinging pellets against their eyes. A great restlessness, a rebellion against indistinct things filled their breasts and made them ache, and persistently their eyes avoided the other’s.

When they had gained the shack and barred the groaning door against the assaults of the storm, she took the easel from his back, stood a moment looking solemnly into his clouded face, and turned without a smile. A moment later, as he sat sunk in a chair before the fire to which he had given fiery wings, she came with his slippers and knelt at his feet. Before he realized what she was doing, she had started to unlace his boots. He drew back angrily, crying:

“Why do you do that!”

But, without changing her pose, she remained kneeling, and suddenly, clutching his knees, she cried passionately:

“Oh, please—please let me!”

Then, with a rise of tears, he understood the longing and the misery she expressed in this instinctive submission, and, leaning suddenly, drew her up into his arms, where she lay with a catch of her breath.

“Mr. Dan, Mr. Dan, you are so unhappy!” she said at the last.

He did not answer, though his arms tightened about her as though he would have crushed the thing he loved.

“You are unhappy—and I have made you so!”

“It can’t be helped,” he said bitterly.

She did not say anything more and, after a moment, drew herself up and out of his arms. Not for a long while did they speak to each other, until the supper was over and the fire had been built for the night. Instead of stretching out on the rug in feline languor, she began to move restlessly about the room, with an indecision that was strange to her. He watched her through the sheltering clouds of tobacco smoke as she went from window to window, listening to something that cried in the soughing chorus of the tempestuous night without, and, as he watched her, he wondered if the day would close thus in this aching unease, this numbed suffering that wrapped them around and yet held them remorselessly from each other. She came to the fireplace and abruptly faced him, her hands behind her back, pain and wistfulness in the anxious searching glance she laid upon him.

“I told you a lie,” she said, all at once. He raised his eyes and looked at her. “About that letter,” she said hastily.

“Yes; I know.”

“You knew, of course,” she said thoughtfully.

“Of course.”

“Are you sure you would rather I told you?” she said earnestly. Then as he frowned and gripped his hands nervously, “It has nothing—it can have nothing to do with us now,” she said desperately, and, as he still hesitated, she added: “It will only hurt you. That is why I did what I did—not to hurt you.”

“I know that, too,” he said. “You were right. Don’t tell me.”

“But I will if you wish,” she said, her eyes growing rounder and larger in the intensity of her gaze, while her lips trembled a little.

“No, no; I don’t want you to!”

He drew a great sigh, rose, and stretched out his arms. But immediately he had refused to hear her explanation, a revulsion came to him. It seemed to him that anything were better than not to know. The mystery that enveloped them had a hundred monstrous figures of doubt and jealousy in it. The one thing he could not combat was the unknown.

“It was a man—a man who loved you?” he cried, before he had realized it.

She caught her breath, startled, collected herself angrily, and at last, looking him directly in the eyes, nodded slowly.

He came closer and stood staring in her averted face.

“And whom you once loved?”

She drew back, turned, looked into his eyes, and turned away again.

“Yes; since you would know.”

He hesitated. Should he go on or should he draw back now while it was yet time, before the self-infliction of pain, before the visualizing of a shadow which meant nothing to them now, which was of the past, as other things had been in his own memory? All at once he stopped, aghast. Tears were in her eyes, and her hands were at her throat.

“Why do you do that?” he said abruptly.

“Because it will hurt you,” she said, shaking her head.

“Yes, yes—horribly!”

“What good does it do?” she said, shaking her head.

“None, none at all—I shan’t ask to know any more,” he said firmly, and he took up his pipe from the table where he had flung it and began to fill it, humming to himself.

She came and stood beside him until he was ready for a light. Then she struck a match and held it to him.

“Very becoming,” he said, with an effort, smiling at the sudden glow that suffused her soft face and gave points of fire to the depths of her eyes.

“I wish you understood me,” she said, with a wistful arching of her brows and a sudden downward slant of her eyes away from his.

“Wish I did!”

“I am different—different from you, I suppose. I don’t let shadows make me sad.”

“No; you are never jealous,” he said bitterly. “In fact, I wonder if you are capable of such an emotion.”

She appeared to consider this question.

“I suppose not,” she said, at length.

“What!” he exclaimed. “Not even—not even if you saw another woman coming into my life—really?”

“If that happened, I should go away—quietly,” she said thoughtfully.

“And you would not suffer?”

“Oh, yes—of course—I should suffer, but I should disappear just the same, for the world would be empty to me.” She looked at him a moment, hesitated, and said: “That would be something real, not something that is ended or something that might happen. You see, it’s this. You have something in you that I haven’t got.”

“What?”

“Sentiment.”

“I believe that is so,” he said suddenly, yet he continued to look at her, mystified.

“I mean it this way,” she said pensively. “You don’t see me at all as I am. You see me as you wish to see me. It is very beautiful, but it is not always me, and so sometimes I feel that it’s not me you love and, and I wonder——”

“You’d rather I didn’t idealize you?” he said, greatly astonished.

She smiled with a smile that changed the sadness prophetic in her eyes to a glow of happiness.

“No; I want you to feel as you do just now,” she said shyly, “even——”

“Well, even what?”

“Even if you wake up after,” she said solemnly.

“Inga!” he cried, in a furious protest. But she avoided the arms which sought to sweep her down to him.

“That’s what I mean by sentiment,” she said hastily. “Do you understand?”

He paused, his curiosity returning.

“And you?”

“I? Oh, I see you and love you for what you are.”

“Even for my weaknesses?”

She looked at him, her eyes deep in his eyes.

“Above all for that,” she said, and, though her lips turned slowly into a smile, her eyes remained sad. “I wish——”

“What?” he asked as she stopped.

She shook her head.

“That I should always remain what I was—a derelict worth saving?”

She looked at him suddenly and so fiercely that he laughed, and caught her in a passionate embrace.

“Look out! If I get to behaving too well, you’ll lose interest in me, Inga,” he said, laughing.

To this she made no reply.

He was astonished at the things she had shown him she had divined. He recognized their truth. He even felt that in her eyes was some strange intuition that made them see, beyond his view, down the long lanes of the future. But, above all, he understood that in their love the first phase had ended and another begun—a phase where the bitter and the sweet, sorrow and sadness, possession and denial would forevermore go hand in hand. She knew it, too, for that night they lay wakefully in each other’s arms and though they lay clasped in the oblivion of the night they spoke no word, for what lay in their minds they could not say to each other.

---

Yet this knowledge that life in all its aspects could not be avoided, that the thoughts which he cried out against could not be stilled, and that, even as he loved her, the woman of the present, he must suffer fiercely and weakly for what she had been, entered into that inner consciousness of the artist and illuminated it with a new, miraculous sense of power.

When he returned to his work, the test of sorrow brought him a deep comprehension. In the completeness of his dream he had forgotten what no artist should forget—that life is tragedy. He put before him a canvas which a week before had thrilled him with its mastery. He looked now and saw that it was only half truth, that he had done it in an ecstasy of sentimentalism. He threw it aside and began swiftly to paint in another. And as he looked upon the immemorial rocks with their head-dresses of sand-grasses turning with the first colorful touches of the autumn, he perceived beneath the surface pleasure to the eyes something grim and tragic in this spectacle of summer stifling in the arms of autumn, in these scarred and rocky sentinels, waiting the momentary flurry of the bitter time; the soul of those things which cannot die, inscrutable, contemplative and majestic, amid the poignant sadness of the green world which must die and die again, endlessly returning to its pain.

He painted breathlessly, seized by something poignant and illuminating that drove him on, and when he had ended, he covered the canvas hastily, afraid to look at it. For a week he worked in this frenzy, without pause for self-analysis, warned only by the fever of work which possessed him that what he had done was true, feeling in himself immense, clarifying changes, a detachment of vision he had never had—a new, stern independence of the intellect which he had purchased at the price of the intoxication of the senses.

At the end of this period, a certain heaviness of the spirit succeeded. He felt that he had worked beyond his capacity, aware of profound weariness and dejection. The next morning he postponed the morning’s sketching.

“No work to-day,” he said, “I feel like looking over what I’ve done. Let’s get out the canvases and sit in judgment.”

“First fall exhibition?” she said, laughing.

“Exactly.”

Together they brought out the voluminous records of the summer and ranged them about the walls. As he studied them, group by group, in their historical progress, he nodded, surprised himself at the richness of the record, its sincerity and grasp. At the end, he brought out the dozen sketches of the past fortnight, which he had put away each evening without an appraising glance, reserving them even from Inga. He placed them in a row and stood back to watch the girl. She stood before them, making no comment, but so accustomed was he to her moods, that he comprehended at once the depth of her tribute. In truth, she was overwhelmed by the revelation of a new note, something which she would not have been able to define, but which held her transfixed by a penetrating sense of mastery, as sometimes, in the moment of lightest teasing, she had felt herself breathlessly impotent in the sudden closing-about her of his compelling arms.

“So this is what you have been doing,” she said, in a reverie. Then she turned and looked at him, seeing a new self in the man. “What made you do this?”

“You.”

“I? How so?”

“Things you’ve done—things you’ve said, about sentiment, you know,” he said rather incoherently.

His glance returned to his work, and he felt a sudden thrill, even an astonishment, transcending all earthly happiness at the recognition of what had come to him.

“You said I’ve done this?” she said, frowning.

“By making me suffer,” he said quietly. “Oh, I needed it! It was right. It came, I suppose, with that letter. If it hadn’t,” he added, smiling, “I suppose I should have gone on dreaming—for the dreaming was sweet—with you, Inga.”

“Yes, I see,” she said, nodding.

“What do you see, I wonder?” he said curiously.

“You don’t need me any more,” she said, looking not at him but at the work.

“I have gotten above myself,” he said pensively. “I am not afraid of life—in its completeness now. The bitter as well as the sweet—they are both good, both vital.”

“You see in a way that makes one feel strange things—even to a sense of time.”

“It’s impersonal, isn’t it?”

“Very.”

“For the first time?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if I will keep it,” he said moodily.

She turned, laying her hand on his arm, nodding her head, with conviction.

“You won’t lose it now.”

“And yet,” he said, laying his hand on her head, “there are times when I wonder if it had not been better—not to wake up.”

“You feel differently—about me, don’t you?” she said slowly.

“No.”

“Yes, yes—oh, it’s not that you love me less, I think, but—but if I went away, you would stand by yourself now! I mean it would not crush you.”

“Inga—you will go away some day,” he said, looking at her profoundly, speaking as one sometimes does in inspired moments—a thought which flashes across the lips before the will can check it.

For a moment they stood staring at each other, equally amazed.

“Why did you say that?” she said, at last, of the two the most visibly astounded.

“I don’t know—I hardly knew I’d said it. And yet I believe what I said is true. More, I believe you believe so, too. Isn’t that the truth?”

“Some day—yes; I’m sure,” she said, looking at him solemnly.

“When, I wonder?”

He felt as though something uncanny was in this conversation, a moment of rare and absolute truth had brought a flash of the future. Indeed, the words he had spoken astonished him as much as they had Inga. Yet he felt a sense of conviction, as though, before the verity of his work which faced them, they, too, had faced the truth.

“Are you—sorry?” she said, at length, timidly.

“That the dreaming is over?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “I feel as though now we can talk to each other.”

“That is true,” she said, moving nearer, and she added, “Mr. Dan.”

“Trying to tease me?” he asked, smiling.

She shook her head. He was looking into his canvases hungrily; he did not see her eyes or comprehend the significance of her return to the old deference, but, for a moment, while they stood gazing at the victory on the canvas, she swayed against him slightly, and her hand slipped under his arm as though clinging to its protection.

An hour later, when he remembered the suddenness with which he had prophesied that the day would come when she would go her own way out of his life, he was amazed and puzzled to comprehend the impulse he had obeyed. At the bottom, he believed in no such possibility. What he had said must have been said in some sudden cruelty of love to test her, to know that, if she could quiver before such a possibility, the intensity of her devotion was constant. A little conscience-stricken, he referred to it that evening.

“That was a crazy thing I said about your leaving,” he began lightly. “Queer mood I was in.”

“We can’t help having queer thoughts. That’s natural,” she said quietly, looking down at the floor.

He laughed a full-throated, confident laugh.

“Well, you know, Inga—I did feel that about you—at first.”

“And now?”

“Just try, little viking!”

“And yet you are very”—she stopped and slowly accentuated the word—“very different.”

“How so?” he asked, a little uneasily.

She hesitated and perhaps changed the intention of her answer. “It’s the way you look at me. I think you see me as I am now.”

“That happens always when you love,” he said pensively. “And it means something deeper, surer—something quieter. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes.”

He could not divine from her manner any special regret or that any serious consideration remained from his thoughtless remark. In fact, he felt in her a new sense of closeness, an almost Oriental solicitude of his slightest desire or comfort. When he went out now in the sharp chill of the autumn mornings, she no longer went roaming away over the rocks, or played over the sand reaches, tantalizing the waves with sudden rushes. Instead, she camped down at his side on a great rug, her hands propping up the tanned oval face, her eyes dreaming into the distance. At times, he felt their gaze turned on him for long, unvarying moments. He remembered a favorite pointer of his college days, who had adored him as no one else had worshiped him, and the strange sense of the summer’s end which had possessed the animal to lie in mute staring wonder at his side, by some canine intuition of change. The dog had died years ago. He had never replaced him.

A certain calm content came into his soul in these soaring days. A change had operated in him; a gust of divine madness had passed, and with it all the rebellion against the progress of life. He had loved as youth loves, blindly, fiercely, flinging all his self in impulsive sacrifice, longing to be convinced that with love he had found the ardent, fiery youth which he had renounced. Now, in the awakened sense of power, he faced middle age with a confident triumph. He saw ahead clear regions of light that opened immeasurable horizons of life. He had found himself, and, as he looked at her from time to time, with eyes satisfied with the charm of life and color, he said to himself that he would never again be capable of the fierce, gripping ache of jealousy which had possessed him. Yet it was good to have her close to his side, to listen to the low music of her voice, and yield to the enveloping charm of her ministering devotion. The first obsessing spell had given place to this—it was good to be so loved. She was the companion above all others he needed for what lay ahead. It was even providential. He felt a deep and tender sense of gratitude that softened the almost cruel confidence which had come to him in his new self-sufficiency.

By the middle of November, the weather had become so stormy and chill that work was only a question of haphazard moments. He began to feel a new longing—an impulse back to that world of conflict and multitudes, of strife and jealousy and competition, which he had left behind him in loathing and renunciation. When the fog and the rain hung outside, he would spend long days in contemplating his sketches, making notes of future compositions to be arranged. He had gone far and he knew it. Yet one thing was lacking. He wanted the tribute of others, of the old associates who had given him up in despair, written him off the ledger of life. At times, thinking of how they would stare and stand amazed before this triumphant renaissance, he felt restless impulses to go rushing back, a need of the sensations of happiness and triumph in every form, a boyish craving for applause. Inga read these signs only too clearly, and as the thought of return was to her a dread one, woman-like she went ahead to meet the inevitable.

“Well, Mr. Dan, when are you going back?” she said, one night, when she had watched him in long reverie.

“How do you know we’re going back?” he said, surprised.

“It is time,” she said seriously.

“Really?” He looked at her curiously, comprehended what lay in her mind, and said, with an accusing smile: “I’m afraid I’m still mostly a boy, I want to be patted on the back for what I’ve done.”

“That’s only right,” she said quietly. “It is what you need, too. When shall we go?”

“Say next week.”

She shook her head.

“Sooner.”

“Day after to-morrow?”

“To-morrow,” she said, with a firm little bob of her head. “When things must be done, it’s better to have them over.”

He felt a leap within him at the thought of the great city which was his again. Then he looked at her and laid his hands on her shoulders.

“We will come back—next summer,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back at him, meeting his eyes steadily.

---