"And yet," she wavered, a look of intenser and clearer pain drifting into her eyes, "he was—so dear! Ah...."
If Richard were suddenly to come toward her out of the past; if he were to come toward her here, along this brown beach; if he should hold out his arms to her and bid her to come back.... No, no! She clasped her hands, for it was all so real. "No, no," she whispered. "I would not go back. I would not dare go back." She had seen him coming toward her many times in fancy, stretching out his arms to her, speaking to her after his wont. And she had learned to play out her prohibiting side of the terrible ordeal so faithfully, so often, that at length the only emotion she felt was that sense of dullness that goes with things which are irrevocable.
"No, Richard," she would say. "I gave myself to you once. You might have had me then. But not now. It is too late."
She would dismiss him, calmly and sorrowfully; would permit her tongue to utter no words other than these. And yet.... She walked slowly along, pondering her life.
What changes had come with the years! What changes! Now her heart was given to another man. This was another sort of love, another sort altogether. Lynndal and Richard were so unlike! Louise wondered whether the love of any two men could be so strikingly unlike as she saw the love of Richard and of Lynndal to be. Indeed, it rather pleased her, as she set them off, one against the other, that the distinction should be so great. It seemed to argue an indeterminate yet quite thrilling variety in herself—not of course, a mere vulgar facility in shifting or adapting herself to types as chance flitted them across her horizon—ah, no!—but a real sense of understanding, a genius for grasping the salient elements in many men, a cleverness in appraising their worth. She bolstered her troubled and ghost-ridden heart.
Lynndal was the opposite of Richard, in every way—in every way, that is, except that he, too, loved her. No, she would say in every way, for she knew now that Richard had never really cared, while Lynndal, that was certain, cared very deeply and enduringly.
Her heart quickened now as she thought of her lover. She began reviving, in a happy, drifting way, the slender accumulation of noteworthy items in their romance, hers and Lynndal's: thought of their first meeting, in the lobby of the hotel in Arizona, when she was with her father on one of his infrequent "business" trips. The Rev. Needham owned a little property in the great dry-farming district of Arizona. "This is my good friend Mr. Barry," her father had said. And she had said she was pleased to make his acquaintance, and she had given him her gloved hand. She had thought little about him at the time. And that, perhaps more tellingly than anything else, argued the palpable differences. For Richard she had loved at first sight. He had captured her, madly and hopelessly, alas, quite at the outset. Not so Lynndal. Oh, no.
Louise was much given to musing and contemplation of this sort, which often took, as now, an odd conversational expression.
"I didn't love Lynndal at all, in the first place," she told herself, as though this were the first really definite understanding of the case. "I didn't begin to care until the week was half over. But I saw he cared. I knew that I attracted him from the beginning."
And then she left the beach and strolled up into the village.