“You seem to forget you’re talking about what happened when I was a little school-girl, and about an old—a very old friend of my family. We all have pictures of Mr. Galbraith—and, why, there’s one of you there, too.”
“On the altar?”
(Oh, Bella! Bella! How could you!) “The one on the flower-table was put there because Bella asked me to. It’s not there any more. And while it was, I looked upon it as the future husband of my dearest friend.”
But the description of Bella sounded suddenly ironic. It hurt. For Cheviot was the man who all along had laughed at girls’ friendships, and all along he had known that Bella was capable of—
“It isn’t that I couldn’t forgive you for not being in love with me,” he said. “But for being in love with a photograph and a packet of letters—no! that wasn’t easy. At the same time I knew well enough that if your life hadn’t been so narrow, you wouldn’t have been so at the mercy of this one romantic figure in it. If you’d been able to travel, or even to go to the university—if you’d had any other door open, you wouldn’t have looked so long out of that one window.”
A scrap of one of Mrs. Browning’s letters flew across her mind—the dearer somehow for being a little incoherent, not fitted together at all, yet finely consequent to the inner spirit—those words: “The pleasantest place in the house is the leaning out of the window.”
Ah, it was very true of the Mar house.
“And your mother,” Cheviot went on, “always ready to puncture any home-blown bubble with the needle of her wit; mercilessly critical, for fear her children should have too low standards; ready to flay anybody alive in the cause of education. Never letting you rest satisfied for a moment with the attainable—you must always be reaching out—reaching out—and when you reached out you touched Galbraith.”
How strangely well he knew—this man. It was odd, but she could never again think him obtuse, at any rate. That comfort was gone.
“I was even sorry for you while the engagement lasted,” the low voice went on, unmindful of the uneasy stir of the figure sitting above him in the dusk. He took the half-smoked cigar from his lips and laid it by the pillar. Over the edge of the porch the tip shone red. “I saw how hard it was for you; you had been weaving romances round Galbraith for years—you had looked upon him for so long as your special property—” Hildegarde drew back into the deeper shadow. But by his own suffering urged to win a companion in pain, he persisted: “And you thought if it had been you he had met, it would have been you that he—” Hildegarde’s skirts rustled as if she were getting up—“Look here, I’ve told you before you’ve got a genius for truth—I’m treating you on that basis.” She said nothing, but she sat still. “There was a moment,” Cheviot’s voice was unnaturally low, “last spring, when I knew I was gaining ground with you. It was the day I came back from Mexico. I came here straight from the station, and you—you—” She heard him strike his hands suddenly together in the dusk, and a curious excitement took hold of her. “When I went home, I found the invitation to Bella’s wedding. It had been lying there for days. Then I understood. You had had all those days and nights to get accustomed to realizing it was the end of the old—where are you going? Can’t you even bear to have me speak of it this once!”