"You only saw her in noble circumstances."
"Oh, Jack," Mary's eyes were full of tears as she looked at him now, "that's the worst of all; that you have come to speak of her like that."
XXVIII
Even Valerie couldn't dispel the encompassing cloud of gloom at dinner. One couldn't do much in such a fog but drift with it. And Jack saw that she was fit for no more decisive action.
Imogen, pale, and almost altogether silent, said that she was very tired, and went up-stairs early. Rose and Eddy, in a shaded corner of the drawing-room, engaged in a long altercation. The others talked, in desultory fashion, till bedtime. No one seemed fit for more than drifting.
It was hardly eleven when Jack was left alone with Mrs. Upton.
"You are tired, too," he said to her; "dreadfully tired. I mustn't ask for our talk."
"I should like a little stroll in the moonlight." Valerie, at the open window, was looking out. "In a night or two it will be too late for us to see. We'll have our walk and our talk, Jack."
She rang for her white chuddah, told the maid to put out the lamps, and that she and Mr. Pennington would shut the house when they came in. From the darkened house they stepped into the warm, pale night. They went in silence over the lawn and, with no sense of choice, took the mossy path that led to the rustic bench where they had met that afternoon.
It was not until they were lost in the obscurity of the woods that Valerie said, very quietly: "Do you remember our talk, Jack, on that evening in New York, after the tableaux?"