As he walked away he meditated about Marian. How she hated him! Oh, not because he had broken their engagement. In the end she had seen eye-to-eye with him about that, acquiescing cynically in his second estimate of her (which, he knew now, had been as false as his first). She was angry because he had not come to her house that winter night. He pictured vividly how she must have looked, what she must have felt, while she sat there waiting and waiting, till at last, white and still with fury, she went up to bed. She had offered him all that she thought she had to give, and he had accepted, then changed his mind. Consciously superior in morals, she must have thought him. He hadn’t been, heaven knew! No wonder she hated him! He had no passion left for Marian—at least, there was none in the thought of her; there was no telling what her physical presence might stir up in him—but he felt a bruised tenderness for her and sorrow that she should be so wretched. He had loved her. Her alone!
After a while he came to the park. And there, sitting on the same bench from which she had called to him that afternoon when Stacey had broken his engagement to Marian, he found Mrs. Latimer. But now he saw her first and stood quite near to her for a full half-minute before she caught sight of him. Now, as then, she was poking holes in the gravel with the point of a parasol, but she did not seem the same, he thought; her pose was tired, and the droop of her shoulders. When she became aware of some one’s close presence and looked up he was shocked; she appeared so old and worn. Then her face flashed into glad recognition, and the impression lost its acuteness.
“Why, Stacey,” she exclaimed, “did you drop from the sky?” She moved over to make room for him on the bench, and he sat down.
“It’s just about a year ago—not quite,” he returned, “that I found you here in the same place. Only then you had to call me. This time it’s I who surprise you. I’m awfully glad to see you, Mrs. Latimer. I was coming to your house presently.”
“And you got back?”
“Yesterday.”
She gazed at him with affectionate curiosity. And now her familiar smile and bearing, all her known quality, was as a lack of focus in a lens, blurring the objective; yet, even so, he still felt that she was somehow changed—older, less resilient.
“You look very strong and composed and sure of yourself,” she said at last.
“Do I? Well, that’s good!” he returned lightly.
She let it go at that, tactfully, and they talked of outside things,—of his life in Pickens, of Vernon, of how lovely the month was. About herself Mrs. Latimer said nothing at all, and this worried Stacey until it occurred to him that she had never talked of herself, save only, suddenly, on that one afternoon a year ago here in the park.