"And—and—she?"—Imogen accepted the restatement, though her voice trembled a little more.
He now looked up at her, a clear, blue ray from his honest eyes. "Well, there, you know, it has been a relief. I could never tell, in the past; she showed me nothing, except that friendship; but since she has been free, since I've seen her over here, she has shown me quite clearly, that it was, on her side, only that."
Imogen was silent for a long time. She didn't "know" at all. And there was a great deal to accept; more, oddly enough, than she had ever faced. She had always believed that it had been like lamplight to daylight. But, whatever it had been, the day had conquered it. And how dear, how noble of her lover to show, so unfalteringly, his loyalty to the past. It was with a sigh made up of many satisfactions that she said at last:—"Dear mama;—I am so glad that I took nothing she cared for from her."
It was on that afternoon that she found her time for "standing forth in the light" before her mother.
She didn't want it to be indoors; she felt, vaguely, that four walls would make them too intimate, as it were; shut them into their mutual consciousness too closely. So that when she saw her mother, after tea, watering and gathering her flowers at the edge of the wood, she went out to her, across the grass, sweet and mild in the long white dress that she had worn since joy had come to her.
She wished to be very direct, very simple, very sweet.
"Mama, darling," she said, standing there beside her while Valerie, after a quiet glance up at her, continued to cut her roses;—"I want to say something to you. This seems such a beautiful time to say deep, grave things in, doesn't it, this late afternoon hour? I've wanted to say it since the other night when, through poor Jack's folly of revenge and blindness, we were all put into such an ugly muddle, at such ugly cross-purposes." She paused here and Valerie, giving neither assent nor negation, said: "Yes, Imogen?"
"I want to say to you that I am sorry, mama dear";—Imogen spoke gravely and with emphasis;—"sorry, in the first place, that I should so have misjudged you as to imagine that—at your time of life and after your sobering experience of life—you were involved in a love affair. I see, now, what a wrong that was to do to you—to your dignity, your sense of right and fitness. And I'm sorrier that I should have thought you capable of seconding Jack's attempts to keep from me a love that had drawn to me as a magnet to the north. The first mistake led to the second. I had heard your friends conjecturing as to your feeling for Basil, and the pain of suspecting that of you—my father's new-made widow—led me astray. I think that in any great new experience one's whole nature is perhaps a little off-balance, confused. I had suffered so much, in so many ways;—his death;—Jack's unworthiness;—this fear for you;—and then, in these last days, for what you know, mama, for him, because of him—my father, a suffering that no joy will ever efface, that I was made, I think, for a little time, a stranger to myself. And then came love—wonderful love—and it shook my nature to its depths. I was dazzled, torn, tempest-tossed;—I did not see clearly. Let that be my excuse."
Valerie still stopped over her roses, her fingers delicately, accurately busy, and her face, under the broad brim of her hat, hidden.
Again Imogen paused, the rhythm of her words, like an echo of his voice in her own, bringing a sudden sharp, sweet, reminiscence of her father, so that the tears had risen to her eyes in hearing herself. And again, for all reply, her mother once more said only: "Yes, Imogen."