"Oh, in your heart!"
"Yes, in my heart. It's where I'm strongest—just as it's where dad is strongest, too, if he'd only been true to himself. But that's a side issue. What I want to say now—and what I'd like you to understand—is that I know that Jennie is good and pure and true and one of the sweetest and loveliest spirits God ever made. I know it!"
Junia couldn't be as feminine as she was without gazing in awe and admiration at the tall, upright figure, which seemed taller and more upright for the moonlight.
"Would you know it—mind you, I'm only putting it this way—would you know it—with her own evidence to the contrary?"
"Yes, mother; I should know it—with her own evidence to the contrary."
She shivered and turned away from him.
"I must really go in now, dear. I'm so afraid of catching cold. But—but good night!"
Having kissed him, she went down the steps, turning once more to look back at him. Silhouetted against the oblong of light between two rough pilasters, he was mechanically taking out his case and selecting a cigarette.
"You're splendid, Bob," she said, with a ring of sincerity that startled him. "That's the way to love a woman. If there were only more men like you! And—I will say it, in spite of the things you've just made me confess—there must be something very, very good in a girl to—to call forth that kind of love."
But Jennie herself made that kind of love more difficult. On returning to town Bob found her changed. During all the weeks of the modus vivendi she had been gentle, submissive, grateful, accepting his terms in the provisional spirit in which she understood them, and carrying them out. When Teddy's affairs were settled—and they never defined what they meant by that—she knew they were to have a reckoning; but the reckoning was to be postponed till then.