"You will? If only you knew how I cared!"
"I do, dear Jack."
"Not how much, not how much. You can't know that. It almost gives me my right, you know, to see. When will you talk to me?"
"Some time to-night, when we can have a quiet moment. I'll tell you about the things that have happened—nothing to make you sad, I hope. And I'll ask you some questions, too, Jack, about your very odd behavior!"
Really she was wonderful; it was almost her own gaiety, flickering like pale sunlight upon her face, that she had regained, and, as they went together over the lawn to where the tea-table was laid in the shade, he saw that she could face them all. No one would know. And her last words had given him heart, had lifted, a little, the heavy weight of foreboding. Perhaps, perhaps, her grief wasn't for herself. "Oh, but I can't be candid till you are," he said, the new hope shining in his eyes.
"Oh, yes, you will be," she returned. "You won't ask me to be candid.
You'll give and not ask to get back. I know you, Jack."
No one could guess; Sir Basil least of all. That was apparent to Jack as he watched them all sitting at tea under the apple-trees. Sir Basil had never looked so radiant, so innocent of any connection with suffering. He exclaimed over the beauties of their long drive. They had crossed hill and dale; they had lost their way; they had had lunch at a village hotel, an amusing lunch, ending with ice-cream and pie, and, from the undiminished reflection of his contentment on Valerie's features, Jack knew that any faintest hint of the pale, stricken anguish of the woodlands had never for an instant hovered during the drive. This was the face that Sir Basil had seen for all the happy, sunny, picnic day, this face of gay tranquillity.
Sir Basil and Mrs. Upton, indeed, expressed what gaiety there was among the group. Mary, in her blue lawn, looked very dreary. Rose and Eddy were ill-tempered, their day, plainly, having ended in a quarrel. As for Imogen, Jack had felt her heavy eye rest upon him and her mother as they came together over the lawn, and felt it rest upon her mother and Sir Basil steadily and somberly, while they sat about the tea-table. The long drive, Sir Basil's radiance, her mother's serenity, how must they look to Imogen? Jack could conjecture, though knowing, for his own bitter mystification, that what they looked like was perhaps not what they meant. Imogen must be truly at bay, and he felt a cruel satisfaction in the thought of her hidden, her gnawing anxiety. He was aware of every ring of falsity in her placid voice and of every flash of fierceness under the steeled calmness of her eye. He noticed, too, for the rest of the day, that, whatever Imogen's desperation, she made no effort to see Sir Basil alone. Almost ostentatiously she went away to her room after tea, saying that she had had bad news of an invalid protégé and must write to her. She paused, as she went, to lean over Mary, a caressing hand upon her shoulder, and to speak to her in a low tone. Mary grew very red, stammered, and said nothing.
"Miss Upton overworks, I think," observed Miss Bocock. "I've thought that she seemed overstrained all day."
Mary had risen too, and as she wandered away into the flower garden, Jack followed her.