Mary Ware in Texas

by Annie F. Johnston

He was looking directly into her eyes, laughingly, teasingly, and a wave of color swept over her face. Roberta would have evaded the question, and turned it off with a laugh. Mary was too simple and direct. It was the moment she had long felt must confront her some time. Her day of reckoning had come for playing eavesdropper. No matter how hard she fought against doing so, she knew she was going to confess that she had been one, albeit unintentionally.

As he repeated his question with smiling insistence, the words stuck in her throat, but the thought uppermost in her mind called out to him by some strange, telepathic power, and he understood as if she had spoken.

"You think," he said slowly, looking into her eyes as if the written words were actually before him there and he was reading them aloud, "you think that it is on Lloyd's account. How did you know about—that?"

It startled her so that he should read her thought in such a way that she could only stammer in reply:

"I—I—heard you singing to her once at The Locusts, that song you sang last night, 'Till the stars are old,' and I thought if you cared for her as it sounded both times, that there couldn't be anybody else, ever!"

Phil turned partly away from her, and stared off towards the hills a moment, his eyes narrowed into a thoughtful, musing expression. Finally he said, "I thought so, too, Mary, once. I thought it for a number of years. That time will always be one of the sweetest and most sacred of my memories. One's earliest love always is, they say, like the first white violet in the spring."

There was a long pause, then he finished the sentence by turning around to her to say, significantly, "But there's always a summer after every spring, you know. Come on, we'd better be getting aboard again. It looks as if they're about ready to start."

He helped her up the steps and followed her down the aisle. While adjusting the window-shade before she took her seat, he began to talk of other things, and the subject was dropped between them. But it was not dropped in Mary's mind. She had been called on to adjust herself to a new viewpoint of him so quickly that it left her mentally gasping. With his own hand he had ruthlessly swept away one of her dearest illusions. She had always believed that no matter who else might forget, he would always stand as a model of manly constancy. What surprised her now was not his change of view. It was her own. By that one sentence he had made it perfectly clear to her that it was not reasonable to expect him to go on mourning always for the "first white violet." It was only natural that summer should follow the spring.

But the puzzle now was, who was good enough and sweet and high and fine enough to follow Lloyd? Mary was positive that there was nobody. He might hunt the whole world over, but she was sure he would be doomed to disappointment in the end. Her motherly concern over that was almost as great as her sympathy had been when she thought of him as doomed to carry a secret sorrow with him to the grave.

After that the conversation was not so personal. It was nearly noon when they reached Bauer, and in that time they had exchanged views on enough subjects to have filled an encyclopædia. Twice after that they talked together alone. The first time was when they went out in the boat just before sunset. Mary wanted him to see Fernbank in all its glory of fresh April greenness, with the little waterfalls splashing their fine mist over the walls of delicate maiden-hair.