Valerie, on sinking into the low wicker chair, and drawing her chuddah about her shoulders, drawing it closely, although the evening was not cool had expected to find Jack, or Mrs. Wake, or Miss Bocock presently beside her.

She had watched, as they wandered, all of them, into the drawing-room, the hovering, long since familiar to her, of Sir Basil. She had seen that his eye was as much on Imogen as on herself. She had seen Imogen's eye meet his with a deep insistence. What it commanded, this eye, Valerie did not know, but she had grown accustomed to seeing such glances obeyed and she expected to watch, presently, Imogen's and Sir Basil's departure into the moonlit woods.

It was, therefore, with surprise that she looked up to see Sir Basil's form darken against the sky. He asked if he might smoke his cigar beside her, and the intelligent smile he knew so well rested upon him as he took the chair next hers.

In the slight pause that followed, both were thinking that, since their parting in England they had really been very seldom alone together, and in Sir Basil's mind was a wonder, very disquieting, as to what, really, had been the understanding under the parting.

He was well aware that any vagueness as to understanding had been owing entirely to Valerie, well aware that had she not always kept about them the atmosphere of sunny frankness and gay friendship, he would without doubt have entangled himself and her in the complications of an avowed devotion, and that long before her husband's death. For how she had charmed him, this gay, this deep-hearted friend, descending suddenly on his monotonous life with a flutter of wings, a flash of color, a liquid pulse of song, like some strange, bright bird. Charm had grown to affection and to trustful need, and then to the restlessness and pain and sadness of his hidden passion. He would have spoken, he knew it very well, were it not that she had never given him the faintest chance to speak, the faintest excuse for speaking. She had kept him from any avowal so completely that he might well, now, wonder if his self-control had not been owing far more to the intuition of hopelessness than to mere submission. Could she have kept him so silent, had she been the least little bit in love with him? He had, of course, been tremendously in love with her—it was bewildering to use the past tense, indeed—and she, of course, clever creature that she was, must have known it; but hadn't he been very fatuous in imagining that beneath her fond, playful friendship lay the possibility of a deeper response?

Since seeing her again, in her effaced, maternal rÔle, he had realized that she was more middle-aged than he had ever thought her, and since coming to Vermont there had been a new emphasis in this cool, gray quality that removed her the more from associations with youth and passion. So was he brought, by the dizzy turn of events, to hoping that loyalty to his own past love was, for him, the only question, since loyalty to her, in that respect, had never been expected of him.

Yet, as he took his place beside her and looked at her sitting there in the golden light, wrapped round in white, very wan and pale, despite her smile, he felt the strangest, twisted pang of divided desire.

She was wan and she was pale, but she was not cool, she was not gray; he felt in her, as strongly as in far-off days, the warmth and fragrance, and knew that it was Imogen who had so cast her into a shadow. Her image had grown dim on that very first time of seeing Imogen standing as Antigone in the rapt, hushed theater. That dawn had culminated to-day in the over-mastering, all-revealing burst of noon, and from its radiance the past had been hardly visible except as shadow. But now he sat in the moonlight, the past personified in the quiet presence beside him, and the memory of noonday itself became mirage-like and uncertain. He almost felt as if he had been having a wild dream, and that Valerie's glance was the awakening from it.

To think of Imogen's filial grief and of his promise to her,—a promise deeply recalled to him by the message of her tear-worn eyes,—to steady his mind to the task of friendly helpfulness, was to put aside the accompanying memory of eyes, lips, gold hair on a background of flowering laurel, was to re-enter, through sane, kind altruism, his old, normal state of consciousness, and to shut the door on something very sweet and wonderful, to shut the door—in Imogen's phraseology—on his soul, but, in doing that, to be loyal to the older hope.

Perhaps, he reflected, looking at Valerie through the silvery circles of smoke, it depended on her as to whether the door should remain shut on all the high visions of the last weeks. After all, it had always depended on her, tremendously, as to where he should find himself. Certainly he couldn't regard her as the antithesis of soul, though he didn't associate her with its radiant demonstration, yet he felt that, if she so willed it, she could lock the door on visions and keep him sanely, safely, sweetly beside her for the future. If she really did care. Poor Sir Basil, sitting there in his faint cloud of smoke, while clouds of doubt and perplexity—as impalpable drifted through his mind, really couldn't for the life of him have told which solution he most hoped for.

He plunged from the rather humiliating pause of self-contemplation into the more congenial field of action, with a last swift thought—most illuminating of all—as he plunged—that in the results of action he would find his test. If she cared for him—really cared—she would grant his request; and if she cared, why then, not only reawakened loyalty, but some very deep acquiescence in his own nature, would keep him beside her, and to-night would see them as affianced lovers. It would be a pity to have let one's new-found soul go; but, after all, it was so very new that the pang of parting would soon be over; that was a good point about middle-age, one soon got over pangs, soon forgot visions.

"I want to talk to you about something. I'm going to ask you to be kinder to me, even, than you've ever been,"—so he approached the subject, while the mingled peace and bitterness of the last thoughts lingered with him. "I'm going to ask you to let me be very indiscreet, very intimate. It's about something very personal."

Valerie no longer smiled, but she looked even more gentle and even more intelligent. "I will be as kind as you can possibly want me to be," she answered.

"It's about—about Miss Upton."

"About Imogen? Don't you call her Imogen yet? You must."

"I will. I've just begun"; and with this avowal Sir Basil turned away his eyes for a moment, and even in the moonlight showed his flush. "I had a long talk with her this afternoon."

"Yes. I supposed that you had. You may be perfectly frank with me," said
Valerie, her eyes on his averted face.

"She was most dreadfully cut up, you know. She came rushing up to the pine woods—I was smoking there—rushing up as if she were running for her life—crying,—exhausted,—in a dreadful state."

"Yes. I know."

"Yes, of course you do. What don't you know and what don't you understand," said Sir Basil gratefully, his eyes coming back to hers. "So I needn't go over it all—what she feels about it. I realize very well that you feel for her as much as I do."

"Oh, yes, you must realize that," said Valerie, a little faintly.

"She was in such a state that one simply had to try to comfort her,—if one could,—and we have come to be such friends;—so she told me everything."

"Yes. Of course."

"Well that's just it. What I want to ask you is—can't you, for her sake, quite apart from your own feelings—give in about it?" So spoke Sir Basil, sitting in the moonlight, the spark of his cigar waning as, in the long pause that followed, he held it, forgotten, in an expectant, arrested hand. Her voice had helped and followed him with such gentleness, such understanding that, though the pause grew, he hardly thought that it needed the added, "I do beg it of you," that he brought out presently to make her acquiescence more sure; and his shock of disappointment was sharpened by surprise to a quick displeasure when, her eyes passing from his face and resting for long on the shadowy woods, she said in a deadened voice, a voice strangely lacking in feeling:—"I can't."

He couldn't conceal the disappointment nor, quite, the displeasure. "You can't? Really you can't?—Forgive me, but don't you think she's a right to have it written, her father's life, you know, if she feels so deeply about it?"

"I can't. I will never give my consent," Valerie repeated.

"But, she's breaking her heart over it," Sir Basil deeply protested; and before the quality of the protestation she paused again, as though to give herself time to hide something.

"I know that it is hard for her," was all she said at last.

Protestation gave way to wonder, deep and sad. "And for her sake—for my sake, let me put it—you can't let bygones be bygones?—You can't give her her heart's desire?—My dear friend, it's such a little thing."

"I know that. But it's for his sake that I can't," said Valerie.

Sir Basil, at this, was silent, for a long time. Perplexity mingled with his displeasure, and the pain of failure, the strangely complex pain.

She did not care for him enough; and she was wrong, and she was fantastic in her wrongness. For his sake?—the dead husband, whom, after all, she had abandoned and made unhappy?—Imogen's words came crowding upon him like a host of warning angel visages. She actually told him that this cruel thwarting of her child was for the sake of the child's father?

It was strange and pitiful that a woman so sweet, so lovely, should so grotesquely deceive herself as to her motives for refusing to see bare justice done.

"May I ask why for him?—I don't understand," he said.

Valerie now turned her eyes once more on his face. With his words, with the tone, courteous yet cold, in which they were spoken, she recognized a reached landmark. For a long time she had caught glimpses of it, ominously glimmering ahead of her, through the sunny mists of hope, across the wide stretches of trust. And here it was at last, but so suddenly, for all her presages, that she almost lost her breath for a moment in looking at it and what it marked. Here, unless she grasped, paths might part. Here, unless she pleaded, something might be slain. Here, above all, something might turn its back on her for ever, unless she were disloyal to her own strange trust.

A good many things had been happening to Valerie of late, but this was really the worst, and as she looked at the landmark it grew to be the headstone of a grave, and she saw that under it might lie her youth.

"I don't believe that you could understand, ever," she said at last in an unaltered voice, a voice, to her own consciousness, like the wrapping of a shroud about her. "It's only I who could feel it, so deeply as to go so far. All that I can say to you is this; my husband was a mediocre man, and a pretentious one. I once loved him. I was always sorry for him. I must guard him now. I cannot have him exposed. I cannot have his mediocrity and pretentiousness displayed to the people there are in the world who would see him as he was, and whose opinion counts."

She knew, as she said it, as she folded the shroud, that he would not be one of those. Her husband's pretentiousness and mediocrity would not be apparent to the ingenuous and uncomplex mind beside her. She knew that mind too well and had watched it, of late, receiving with wondering admiration from her daughter's lips, echoes of her husband's fatuities. She loved him for his incapacity to see sad and ugly and foolish facts as she saw them. She loved his manliness and his childishness. As she had guarded the other, once loved, man from revealment she would have guarded this one from ironic and complex visions. But the lack that endeared him to her might lose him to her. He could never see as she saw and her fidelity to her own light could in his eyes be but perversity. Besides, she could guess at the interpretations that loomed in his mind; could guess at what Imogen had told him; it hardly needed his next words to let her know.

"But was he so mediocre, so pretentious?" he suggested, with the touch of timidity that comes from a deeper hostility than one can openly avow.—"Aren't you a little over-critical—through being disappointed in him—personally? Can you be so sure of your own verdict as all that? Other people, who loved him—who always loved him I mean—are sure the other way round," said Sir Basil.

To prove herself faithful, not perverse, whom must she show to him as unfaithful in very ardor for rightness? In the midst of all the wrenching of her hidden passion came a pang of maternal pity. Imogen's figure, bereaved of her father, of her lover, desolate, amazed, rose before her and, behind it, the hovering, retributory gaze of her husband.

This, then, was what she must pay for having failed, for having wrecked. The money that she handed out must be her love, her deep love, for this lover of her fading years, and she knew that she paid the price, for everything paid the price, above all, for her right to her own complex fidelity, when she said:

"I am quite sure of my own verdict. I take all the responsibility. I think other people wrong. And you must think me wrong, if it looks to you like that."

"But, it's almost impossible for me to think you wrong," said Sir Basil, feeling that a chill far frostier than the seeming situation warranted had crept upon them. "Even if you are—why we all are, of course, most of the time, I suppose. It's only—it's only that I can't see clear. That you should be so sure of an opinion, a mere opinion, when it hurts someone else, so abominably;—it's there I don't seem to see you, you know."

"Can't you trust me?" Valerie asked. It was her last chance, her last throw of the dice. She knew that her heart was suffocating her, with its heavy throbbing, but to Sir Basil's ear her voice was still the deadened, the unchanged voice. "Can't you believe in my sincerity when I give you my reasons? Can't you, knowing me as you do, for so long, believe that I am more likely to be right, in my judgment of my husband, than—other people?"

Her eyes, dark and deep in the moonlight, were steadily upon him. And now, probed to the depths, he, too, was conscious of a parting of the ways It was a choice of loyalties, and he remembered those other eyes, sunlit, limpid, uplifted, that lifted him, too, with their heavenly, upward gaze. He stammered; he grew very red; but he, too, was faithful to his own light.

"Of course I know, my dear friend, that you are sincere. But, as to your being right;—in these things, one can't help seeing crookedly, sometimes, when personal dislike has entered into a,—a near relationship. One really can hardly help it, can one?—" he almost pleaded.

Valerie's eyes rested deeply and darkly upon him and, as they rested, he felt, strangely and irresistibly, that they let him go. Let him go to sink or to soar—that depended on which vision were the truer.

He knew that after his flush he had become very pale. His cigar had gone out;—he looked at it with a nervous gesture. The moonlight was cold and Valerie had turned away her eyes. But as she suddenly rose, he saw, glancing from his dismal survey of the dead cigar, that she was smiling again. It was a smile that healed even while it made things hazy to him. Nothing was hazy to her, he was very sure of that; but she would make everything as easy as possible to him—even the pain of finding her so wrong, even the pain of seeing that she didn't care enough, the complex pain of being set free to seize the new happiness—he was surer of that than ever.

He, too, got up, grateful, troubled, but warm once more.

The moonlight was bright and golden, and the shadows of the vines that stirred against the sky wavered all over her as she stood before him. So strangely did the light and shade move upon her, that it seemed as if she glided through the ripples of some liquid, mysterious element, not air nor light nor water, but a magical mingling of the three. He had just time to feel, vaguely, for everything was blurred, this sense of strangeness and of sweetness, too, when she gave him her hand.

"Friends, as ever, all the same—are we not?" she said.

Sir Basil, knowing that if he glided it was only because she took him with her, grasped it tightly, the warm, tangible comfort. "Well rather!" he said with school-boy emphasis.

Be she as wrong as she would, dear creature of light, of shade, of mystery, it was indeed "well rather." Never had he known how much till now.

Holding the hand, he wondered, gazing at her, how much such a friendship, new yet old, counted for. In revealing it so fully, she had set wide the door, she had set him free to claim his soul; yet so wonderfully did they glide that no gross thought of escape touched him for a moment, so beautifully did she smile that he seemed rather to be gaining something than to be giving something up.