It was a few days after this, just before Jack's return to Boston—and the parting now was to be until they met in Vermont—that he and Imogen had another walk, another talk together.

The mid-May had become seasonably mild and, at Jack's suggestion, they had taken the elevated cars up to Central Park for the purpose of there seeing the wistaria in its full bloom.

They strolled in the sunlight under arbors rippling all over with the exquisite purple, dark and pale, the thin fine leaves of a strange olive-green, the delicate tendrils; they passed into open spaces where, on gray rocks, it streamed like the tresses of a cascade; it climbed and heaped itself on wayside trellises and ran nimbly, in a shower of fragile color, up the trunks, along the branches, of the trees. Jack always afterward associated the soft, falling purple, the soft, languorous fragrance, the almost uncanny beauty of the wistaria, with melancholy and presage.

Imogen, for the first time since her father's death, showed a concession to the year's revival in a transparent band of white at her neck and wrists. Her little hat, too, was of transparent black, its crape put aside. But, though she and the day shared in bloom and youthfulness, Jack had never seen her look more heavily bodeful; had never seen her eyes more fixed, her lips more cold and stern. The excitement that he had felt in her was gone. Her curiosity, her watchfulness, had been satisfied, and grimly rewarded. She faced sinister facts. Jack felt himself ready to face them, too.

They had spoken little in the clattering car, and for a long time after they reached the park and walked hither and thither among its paths, following at random the beckoning purple of the wistaria, neither spoke of anything but commonplaces; indicating points of view, or assenting to appreciations. But Imogen said at last, and he knew that with the words she led him up to those facts: "Do you remember, Jack, the day we met mama, you and I, on the docks?"

Jack replied that he did.

"What a different day from this," said Imogen, "with its frosty glory, its challenge, its strength."

"Very different."

"And how different our lives are," said Imogen.

He did not reply for some moments, and it was then to say gently that he hoped they were not so different as, perhaps, they seemed.

"It is not I who have changed, Jack," said Imogen, looking before her. And going on, as though she wished to hear no reply to this: "Do you remember how we felt as the steamer came in? We determined that she should change nothing, that we wouldn't yield to any menace of the things we were then united in holding dear. It's strange, isn't it, to see how subtly she has changed everything? It's as if our frosty, sparkling landscape, all wind and vigor and discipline, were suddenly transformed to this,—" Imogen looked about her at the limpid day,—"to soft yielding, soft color, soft perfume,—it's like mama, that fragrance of the wistaria,—to something smiling, languid, alluring. This is the sort of day on which one drifts. Our past day was a day of steering."

As much as for the meaning of her careful words, Jack felt rising in him an anger against the sense of a readiness prepared beforehand. "You describe it all very prettily, Imogen," he answered, mastering the anger. "But I don't agree with you."

"You seldom do now, Jack. Perhaps it's because I've remained in my own climate while you have been borne by the 'warm, sweet, harmless' current into this one."

"I am not conscious of any tendency to drift, Imogen. I still steer. I intend, very firmly, always to steer."

"To what, may I ask?"

He was silent for a moment; then said, lifting eyes in which she read all that new steeliness of opposition, with, yet, in it, through it, the sadness of hopeless appeal: "I believe in all our ideals—just as I used to."

To this Imogen made no rejoinder.

"Do you like Sir Basil?" she asked presently, after, for some time, they had turned along the windings of a long path in a heavy silence.

"I've hardly seen him." Jack's voice had a forced lightness, as though for relief at the change of subject; but he guessed that the change was only apparent. "He is very nice; very delightful looking."

"Yes; very delightful looking. Do you happen to remember what I said to you about him, long ago, in the winter? About him and mama?"

"Yes"; Jack flushed; "I remember."

"I told you to wait."

"Yes; you told me to wait."

"You will own now, I hope, that I was right."

"Right in thinking that he—that they were more than friends?"

"Right in thinking that he was in love with her; that she allowed it."

"I suppose you were right."

"I was right. And it's more than that now. I have every reason to believe that she intends to marry him."

He ignored her portentous pause and drop of the voice, walking on with downcast eyes. "You mean, it's an accepted thing?"

"Oh, no! not yet accepted. Mama respects the black edge, you know. But I heard Mrs. Wake and Mrs. Pakenham talking about it."

"Heard? How could you have heard?" Jack's eyes, stern with accusation, were now upon her.

It was impossible for Imogen to lie consciously, and though she had not, in her eagerness that he should own her right and share her reprobation, foreseen this confrontation, she held, before it, all the dignity of full sincerity.

"You are changed, indeed, Jack, when you can suspect me of eavesdropping! I was asleep on the sofa in the library, worn out with work, and I woke to hear them talking in the next room, with the door ajar. I did not realize, for some moments, what was being said. And then they went out."

"Of course I don't suspect you; of course I don't think that you would eavesdrop; though I do hate—hearing," Jack muttered.

"I hope you realize that I share your hatred," said Imogen. "But your opinion of me is not, here, to the point. I only wish to put before you what I have now to bear, Mrs. Pakenham said that she wagered that before the year was out Sir Basil would have married mama." Imogen paused, breathing deeply.

Jack walked on beside her, not knowing what to say. "I think so, too, and wish her joy," would have been the truest rendering of his feeling.

He curbed it to ask cautiously, "And you mind so much?"

"Mind!" she repeated, a thunderous echo.

"You dislike it so?"

"Dislike? You use strangely inapt words."

He had another parenthetic shoot of impatience with her dreadful articulateness; had Imogen always talked so much like the heroine of a novel with a purpose?

"I only meant—can't you put up with it?"

"Put up with it? Can I do anything else? What power have I over her? You don't seem to understand. I have passed beyond caring that she makes herself petty, ridiculous; as a woman of her age must in marrying again—the clutch of fading life at the happiness it has forfeited. Let her clutch if she chooses; let her marry if she chooses, whom she chooses, yes, when she chooses. But don't you see how it shatters my every hope of her,—my every ideal of her? And don't you see how my heart is pierced by the presence of that man in my father's house, the house that she abandoned and cast a shadow upon? How filled with bitter shame and anguish I am when I see him there, in that house, sacred to my grief and to my memories—making love to my mother?"

No, really, never, never had he heard Imogen so fluent and so dramatically telling; and never had he been so unmoved by the feeling under the fluency. It was as if he could believe in none.

He remained silent and Imogen continued: "When she came back, I believed that it was with an impulse of penitence; with the wish, shallow though I knew that it must be in such a nature, to atone to me for the ruin that she had made in his life. I was all tenderness and sympathy for her, all a longing to help and sustain her—as you must remember. But now! It fulfils all that I had feared and suspected in her—and more than all! She left England, she came here, that the conventions might be observed; and, considering them observed enough for her purpose, she receives her suitor, eight months after my father's lonely death,-in the house where my heart breaks and bleeds for him, where I mourn for him, where I—alone, it seems—feel him flouted and betrayed! And she talks of her love for me!"

Jack was wondering that her coherent passion did not beat him into helpless acquiescence; but, instead, he found himself at once replying, "You don't see fairly. You exaggerate it all. She was unhappy with your father. For years he made her unhappy. And now, if she can care for a man who can make her happy, she has a right, a perfect right, to take her happiness. As for her loving you, I don't believe that any one loves you more truly. It's your chance, now, to show your love for her."

Imogen stood still and looked at him from the black disk of her parasol.

"I think I've suspected this of you, too, Jack," she said. "Yes, I've suspected, in dreadful moments of revelation, how far your undermining has gone. And you say you are not changed!"

"Would you ask your mother never to marry again?"

"I would—if she were in any way to redeem her image in my eyes. But, granting to the full that one must make concessions to such creatures of the senses, I would ask her, at the very least, to have waited."

"Creatures of the senses!" Jack repeated in a helpless gasp; such words, in their austere vocabulary, were hardly credible. "Do you know what you are saying, you arrogant, you heartless girl?"

Her face seemed to flash at him like lightning from a black cloud, and with the lightning a reality that had lacked before to leap to her voice:

"Ah! At last—at last you are saying what you have felt for a long time! At last I know what you think of me! So be it! I don't retract one jot or tittle of what I say. Mama is a perfectly moral woman, if you actually imagine some base imputation; but she lives for the pleasant, the pretty, the easy. She doesn't love this man's soul—nor care if he has one. Her love for him is a parody of the love that my father taught me to understand and to hold sacred. She loves his love for her; his 'delightful' appearance. She loves his place and name and all the power and leisure of the life he can give her. She loves the world—in him; and in that I mean and repeat that she is a creature of the senses. And if, for this, you think me arrogant and heartless, you do not trouble in one whit my vision of myself, but you do, forever, mar my vision of you."

They stood face to face in the soft sweet air under an arch of wistaria; it seemed a place to plight a troth, not to break one; but Jack knew that, if he would, he could not have kept the truth from her. It held him, looked from him; he was, at last, inevitably, to speak it.

"Imogen," he said, "I don't want to talk to you about your mother; I don't want to defend her to you; I'm past that. I'll say nothing of your summing up of her character,—it's grotesque, it's piteous, such assurance! But I do tell you straight what I've come to feel of you—that you are a cold-blooded, self-righteous, self-centered girl. And I'll say more: I think that your bringing-up, the artificiality, the complacent theory of it, is your best excuse; and I think that you'll never find any one so generous and so understanding of you as your mother. If this mars me in your eyes, I can't help it."

For a moment, in her deep anger,—horror running through it, too, as though the very bottom had dropped out of things and she saw emptiness beneath her,—she thought that she would tell him to leave her there, forever. But Imogen's intelligence was at times a fairly efficacious substitute for deeper promptings; and humiliation, instead of enwrapping her mind in a flare of passionate vanity, seemed, when such intellectual apprehension accompanied it, to clarify, to steady her thoughts. She saw, now, in the sudden uncanny illumination, that in all her vehemence of this afternoon there had been something fictitious. The sorrow, the resentment on her father's account, she had, indeed, long felt; too long to feel keenly. Her disapproval of the second marriage was already tinctured by a certain satisfaction; it would free her of a thorn in the flesh, for such her mother's presence in her life had become, and it would justify forever her sense of superiority. It was all the clearest cause for indignation that her mother had given her, and, seeing it as such, she had longed to make Jack share her secure reprobation; but she hadn't, really, been able to feel it as she saw it. It solved too many problems and salved too many hurts. So now, standing there under the arch of wistaria, she saw through herself; saw, at the very basis of her impulse, the dislocation that had made its demonstration dramatic and unconvincing. Dreadful as the humiliation was, her lips growing parched, her throat hot and dry with it, her intelligence saw its cause too clearly for her to resent it as she would have resented one less justified. There was, perhaps, something to be said for Jack, disastrously wrong though he was; and, with all her essential Tightness, there was, perhaps, something to be said against her. She could not break, without further reflection, the threads that still held them together.

So, at the moment of their deepest hostility, Jack was to have his sweetest impression of her. She didn't order him away in tragic tones, as he almost expected; she didn't overwhelm him with an icy torrent of reproach and argument. Instead, as she stood there against her halo of black, the long regard of her white face fixed on him, her eyes suddenly filled with tears. She didn't acquiesce for a moment, or, for a moment, imply him anything but miserably, pitiably wrong; but in a voice from which every trace of anger had faded she said: "Oh Jack, how you hurt me!"

The shock of his surprise was so great that his cheeks flamed as though she had struck him. Answering tears sprang to his eyes. He stammered, could not speak at first, then got out: "Forgive me. I'd no business to say it. It's lovely of you, Imogen, not just to send me off."

She felt her triumph, her half-triumph, at once. "Why, Jack, if you think it, why should I forgive you for saying what, to you, seems the truth? You have forgotten me, Jack, almost altogether; but don't forget that truth is the thing that I care most for. If you must think these things of me—and not only of me, of a dearer self, for I understand all that you meant—I must accept the sorrow and pain of it. When we care for people we must accept suffering because of them. Perhaps, in time, you may come to see differently."

He knew, though she made him feel so abashed, that he could take back none of the "things" he thought; but as she had smiled faintly at him he answered with a wavering smile, putting out his hand to hers and holding it while he said: "Shall we agree, then, to say nothing more about it! To be as good friends—as the truth will let us?"

He had never hurt her as at that moment of gentleness, compunction, and inflexibility, and thought, for a moment, was obscured by a rush of bitter pain that could almost have cast her upon his breast, weeping and suppliant for all that his words shut the door on—perhaps forever.

But such impulses were swiftly mastered in poor Imogen. Gravely pressing his hand, she accepted the cutting compact, and, over her breathless sense of loss, held firm to the spiritual advantage of magnanimity and courage. He judged himself, not her, in letting her go, if he was really letting her go; and she must see him wander away into the darkness, alone, leaving her alone. It was tragic; it was nearly unendurable; but this was one of life's hard lessons; her father had so often told her that they must be unflinchingly faced, unflinchingly conquered. So she triumphed over the weak crying out of human need.

They walked on slowly again, both feeling a little "done." Neither spoke until, at the entrance of the park, and just before leaving its poetry for the screaming prose of the great city, Imogen said: "One thing I want to tell you, Jack, and that is that you may trust mama to me. Whatever I may think of this happiness that she is reaching out for, I shall not make it difficult or painful for her to take it. My pain shall cast no shadow on her gladness."

Jack's face still showed its flush and his voice had all the steadiness of his own interpretation, the steadiness of his refusal to accept hers, as he answered, "Thanks, Imogen; that's very right of you."