Chapter 2

She smiled and seemed to assent, but her eyes were not on him; she was still in a revery. He walked softly away. She seemed hardly to notice him, and his last backward glance found the quiet of the picture unbroken; again it was a page from the Greenaway book.

He reached the terrace; laughter and applause from the piazza caught his ear. Fresh from the atmosphere he had left, he stared in amazement at the scene before him.

Swift figures were scudding from one to another of the four great elms that marked out a natural rectangle on the smooth side lawn.

“Puss! puss! Here, puss!” a high voice called, and a tall slender girl in a swish of lace and pink draperies rushed across one side of the square. A portly trousered figure essayed to gain the tree she had left, but a romping girl in white caught him easily, while Mrs. Dud, the tail of her gown thrown over her arm, skimmed triumphantly across to her partner's tree.

“One more, one more, colonel. You can't give up, now you're caught! One more before we go in!” called the pink girl.

“Here's Mr. Varian. Come and help us out--the colonel's beaten!” added Mrs. Dud.

“Here, puss! here, puss!” With excited little shrieks and laughs they dashed by, the colonel making ineffectual grabs at their elusive skirts. Varian shook his head good-naturedly.

“Too late, too late!” he called back, and taking pity on the puffing, purple colonel, he bore him off.

“Thank God! I'm just about winded! I'd have dropped in my tracks,” complained the rescued man, breathing hard as they rounded the shrubbery. In the corner two figures, half seen in the dark, leaned toward each other an imperceptible moment. The colonel laughed contentedly.

“When I see that sort of thing, I think we've made a mistake--eh, Varian?” he said, half serious. “It's a poor job, getting old alone. Live at the club, visit here and there, make yourself agreeable to get asked again, nobody to care if you're sick, always play the other fellow's game--little monotonous after a while, eh?”

Varian nodded. “Right enough,” he said.

“Different ending to their route!” suggested the colonel, jerking his elbow back toward the two in the shrubbery.

“That's it!” The answer was laconic, but the pictures that swept through his brain took on a precision and color that half frightened him.

He had no idea how frequently he dropped in at the little court behind the hedge after that. Sometimes he sat and mused alone there; more than once he took a surreptitious afternoon nap. He developed a dormant fancy for gardening, and walked with his new-old friend contentedly among the deserted garden paths. He studied her hair especially, wondering why it was that the little tender flecks of white attracted him so. At dinner he secretly tried to rouse in himself the same desire to stroke the gleaming silver fleece, high-dressed, puffed, and ornamented with jet, of the woman opposite him, whose hair, somewhat prematurely turned snowy, had won her a great vogue among her friends. But he never succeeded. She was absolutely too effective. She turned the simplest gathering to a fancy-dress ball, he decided.

He had supposed that it was the quaint privacy of their acquaintance that charmed him particularly--the feeling of an almost double existence; but when Mrs. Dud, who, he afterwards reflected, was of course omniscient, restrained herself no longer, and thanked him with a pretty sincerity for his delicate and appreciated courtesy, intimating charmingly that she realized the personal motive, a veil suddenly dropped. He gasped, shook himself, colored a little, and met her eye.

“I'm afraid I'm not so kind as you think,” he said, a little awkwardly. “I've been an old fool, I see. Do you think--is that the way _she_ looks at it?”

“Mary?” said Mrs. Dud, wonderingly. “Yes, I suppose so. Why?”

The naïve egotism of the answer only threw a softer light on the picture that had grown to fill his thoughts. He smiled inscrutably.

“Because in that case it is due to her to undeceive her,” he said. “I am glad I have entertained her. I should like to have the opportunity to do so indefinitely. Do you think there's a chance for me?”

“What on earth do you mean?” asked his hostess, in unassumed stupefaction.

“I mean, do you think she would marry me?” Varian brought out plumply. “Is there--was there ever anybody else?”

For one instant Mrs. Dud lost her poise; in her eyes he almost saw more than she meant; the sheer, flat blow of it levelled her for a breath to the plane of other and ordinary women. But even as he thought it, it was gone. She put out her hand; she smiled; she shook her finger at him.

“I think, my friend, she would be a fool not to marry you,” she answered him, clear-eyed; “and there was never,” her tone was too sweet, he thought, to carry but one meaning--pleasure for him, “there was never anybody else!”

Varian walked straight to the garden. She was training a fiery wall of nasturtiums with firm white fingers. It occurred to him that he was ready to give up the tally-ho, and the Berkshires, and the scramble of pretty girls for the place beside him, to sit quietly and watch her among her flowers.

“I'm getting old--old!” he said to himself, but he said it with a smile.

For he knew that no boy's heart ever beat more swiftly, no boy's tongue ever sought more excitedly to find the right words. But when he faced her a little doubt chilled him: she was so calm and complete, in her sunny, busy, balanced life, that he feared to disturb that sweet placidity. With an undercurrent of fear, a sudden realization that he had no more the blessed egotism of youth to drive him on, he walked beside her, outwardly content, at heart a little solitary. At some light question he turned and faced her.

“You could not have all the greenhouses, but there could be plenty of flowers,” he said pleadingly.

“Flowers? Where?” she asked.

“Wherever we lived,” he answered. “And oh, Mary, I think we could be happy together! Don't say no!” as she shrank a little. “Don't, Mary, for heaven's sake! I care too much--I care terribly. I am too old a man to care so much and--lose.... There, there, my dear girl, never mind. I can bear it, of course. Only I didn't know I'd planned it all out so, and--But never mind. I was going to have a bay-window full of--”

He turned away from her for a moment. But her hand was on his arm.

“We can plan it out together,” she said.

He knew how she would blush; he had even dared to think how directly her clear gray eyes would meet his--her sky-ness was never hesitation--but he had not dreamed how soft her hair could be.