The girl in gray was gone, and down the long street, over which there was a thin glaze of ice, the motor was creeping carefully. She watched it because he was inside. It was all she should see of him till nightfall. The whole of the long day must be passed with this strange new something in her heart—this something that wasn't anything. If he would only come back for a minute and put his arms about her and let her look up into his face she would know it wasn't anything. She did know it; she said so again and again. But if he would only discover that he had forgotten something—a handkerchief or his cigar-case; that did happen occasionally....
And then it was as if her prayer was to be answered while still on her lips. Before the vehicle had got so far away as to be indistinguishable from other vehicles she saw it stop. It stopped and turned. She held her breath. Slowly, very slowly, it began to creep up the gentle slope again. She supposed it must be the treacherous ground that made it move at such a snail's pace. It moved as if the chauffeur or his client were looking for some one. Gradually it drew up at the curb. It was the curb toward the Park—and from another of the little openings with iron posts to space them off appeared the girl in gray.
She advanced promptly, as if she had been called. At the door of the car she stood for a few minutes in conversation with the occupant. For one of the parties at least that method of communication was apparently not satisfactory, for he stepped out, dismissed the cab, and accompanied the girl through the little opening into the Park. In a second or two they were out of sight, down one of the sloping pathways.
During the next two months Edith had no explanation of this mystery, nor did she seek one. After the first days of amazement and questioning she fell back on what she took to be her paramount duty—to trust. She argued that if he had seen her in some analogous situation, however astounding, he would have trusted her to the uttermost; and she must do the same by him. There were ever so many reasons, she said to herself, that would not only account for the incident, but do him credit. The girl might be a stenographer dismissed from his office, asking to be reinstated; she might be a poor relation making an appeal; she might be a wretched woman toward whom he was acting on behalf of a friend. Such cases, and similar cases, arose frequently.
The wonder was, however, that he never spoke of it. There was that side to it, too. It induced another order of reflection. He was so much in the habit of relating to her, partly for her amusement, partly for his own, all the happenings, both trivial and important, of each day, that his silence with regard to this one, which surely must be considered strange—strange, if no more—was noticeable. A wretched woman toward whom he was acting on behalf of a friend! It surely couldn't, couldn't be a wretched woman toward whom he was acting, not on behalf of a friend, but....
That it might be all over and done with would make no difference. Of course it was all over and done with—if it was that. No man could love a woman as he had loved his wife during the past six or seven years, and still—But it wasn't that. It never had been that. If it had been—even before they were married, even before he knew her—But she would choke that thought back. She would choke everything back that told against him. She developed the will to trust. She developed a trust that acted on her doubts like a narcotic—not solving them, but dulling their poignancy into stupor.
So March went out, and April passed, and May came in, with leaves on the trees and tulips in the Park, and children playing on the bits of greensward. She had walked as far as the Zoo with the two little boys, and, having left them with their French governess, was on her way home. People were in the habit of dropping in between four and six, and of late she had become somewhat dependent on their company. They kept her from thinking. Their scraps of gossip provided her, when she talked to her husband, with topics that steered her away from dangerous ground. He himself had given her a hint that a certain ground was dangerous; and, though he had done it laughingly, she had grown so sensitive as to see in his words more perhaps than they meant. She had asked him a question on some subject—she had forgotten what—quite remote from the mystery of the girl in gray. Leaning across the table, with amusement on his lips and in his eyes, he had replied:
"Don't you remember the warning?
'Where the apple reddens
Never pry,
Lest we lose our Edens,
Eve and I.'"