“Always. Always,” she repeated. “I was blinder than you knew. I was more sure of myself.”
He lay looking at her and she looked back at him, but with a look that invited neither argument not protest. It remained remote and vigilant. She might have been the seagull looking down and noting, as she flew onward, that the small figure on the beach so far below had ceased to be that of an assailant in its attitude. How remote she was, white strange, fleeting creature! How near she had been once! The memory of how near rushed over his mind. He had, despite the delirious visions of her stricken face, hardly thought at all, since really seeing her again, of that last time. Everything had fitted itself on, rather, to his earliest memories of her, tinged all of them, it was true, with a deeper meaning, but not till this moment consciously admitting it. It rushed in now, poignant with the recovered smell of wet, dark ivy, the recovered sound of her stifled sobs as she had stumbled, broken, beside him in the rain. And with the memory came the desire that she should again be near.
“Tell me,” he said, “what are you going to do? You said you might be leaving France for ever. Shall you go back to America?”
“I don’t think so. Not for a long time,” she answered. “There will be things to do over here, out of France, for a great many years I imagine.”
He hesitated, then took a roundabout way. “And when I get home, if, owing to you, I ever get there, may I not tell them that you’re safe and sound? It would be happier for them to know that, wouldn’t it?”
Her vigilance still dwelt upon him as though she suspected in this sudden change of subject some craft of approach, but she answered quietly:
“No; I think it will be happier for them to forget me. They will be told if I die. I have arranged for that.”
“They can’t very well forget you,” said Oldmeadow after a moment. “They must always wonder.”
“I know.” She glanced away and trouble came into her face. “I know. But as much as possible. You must not make me real again by telling them. You have promised. You care for them. You know what I mean.”
“Yes; I’ve promised. And I see what you mean. But,” said Oldmeadow suddenly, and this, of course, was what he had been coming to. “I don’t want to forget. I want you to stay real. You must let me know what becomes of you, always, please.”