Then she was very still. She was not weeping now.
III
They would never know what she had endured. Yet her hopes had once run so high.... Well, the pendulum swings; and after all there are no favourites, except perhaps in a whimsical or poetic sense.
Stella and Jerome, at the feet of the everlasting gods; and irony sniffed and chuckled in the corners. Both were vividly conscious of the play of forces in their lives, and of that immense quality of change which, developed through the scenes of the drama that had so capriciously caught them up, revealed itself now in all they did and said.
Calmer, she asked him about his phase of the drama: how had he come on the Star of Troy when she had left him irrevocably in the rut of Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley’s? And he told her a little of his vast adventure, while her heart was stricken with a curious confusion—partly, no doubt, because of the aloof manner which, more and more, he was coming to display toward her.
These were baffling days—and a queer, wrong-way-round business life can be, she thought, when it has a mind. Jerome’s reactions were rather simpler: Stella, alive and married to another man, drifted back into the mere troubled dream which the thought of her death had momentarily broken.
“You’re making something really worth while out of your life, aren’t you?” she said softly, yet in a voice still strained from emotion; and her gaze, across the dimness of the temple, seemed compounded of incredulity, wistfulness, and a wild despair. Occasionally a tiny sob still caught her breath.
Jerome smiled in his new worldly and rather cynical way. “You mustn’t forget,” he generously reminded her, “that to begin with I was carried off like a limp bag of meal!” And then he gave her more details—without bothering, however, to stick quite so close to all the facts as to make himself entirely a comic figure, even in the beginning.
“Isn’t it strange, Jerome, how some of the last things we’d ever think possible are the very things that do happen to us?” Her hands, never still, stroked her cheeks aimlessly.
“I’ve thought of that sometimes,” he answered. “I guess it would never have struck any one as likely, a year or two ago, that you’d end by marrying a man like Mr. King and be carried off to an island to raise opium! And I guess,” he went on impartially, with again the touch of grimness, “it never struck us, either, that I was the kind of fellow who would join an opera troupe and end by letting one of the singers—take my name....” He never could seem quite to bring it out baldly. He had evaded a little, also, with Elsa, and had not used the actual word, though in the end, of course, it amounted to the same thing.