She shook her head, her hair making dim flashes in the firelight. “No, Chilly,” she said. “It makes me wretched to give you pain, but I must—I must! Love isn’t like that. It doesn’t come afterward. I know. I could never give you what you want. You would end by despising me, as I—should despise myself.”
“I won’t give up,” he said incoherently. “I can’t give up. Not so long as I know there’s nobody else. At the ball I thought—I thought perhaps you cared for Valiant—but since he told me—”
He stopped suddenly, for she was looking at him from an ashen face. “He told me there was no reason why I should not try my luck,” he said difficultly. “I asked him.”
There was a silence, while he gazed at her, breathing deeply. Then he tried to laugh.
“All right,” he said hoarsely. “It—it doesn’t matter. Don’t worry.”
She stretched out her hand to him in a gesture of wistful pain, and he held it a moment between both of his, then released it and went hurriedly out.
As the door closed, Shirley sat down, her head dropping into her hands like a storm-broken flower. Valiant had accepted the finality of the situation. With a wave of deeper hopelessness than had yet submerged her, she realized that, against her own decision, something deep within her had taken shy and secret comfort in his stubborn masculine refusal. Against all fact, in face of the impossible, her heart had been clinging to this—as though his love might even attain the miraculous and somewhere, somehow, recreate circumstance. But now he, too, had bowed to the decree. A kind of utter apathetic wretchedness seized upon her, to replace the sharp misery that had so long been her companion—an empty numbness in which, in a measure, she ceased to feel.
An hour dragged slowly by and at length she rose and went slowly up the stairs. Her head felt curiously heavy, but it did not ache. Outside her mother’s door, as was her custom, she paused mechanically to listen. A tiny pencil of light struck through the darkness and painted a spot of brightness on her gown. It came through the keyhole; the lamp in her mother’s room was burning. “She has fallen asleep and forgotten it,” she thought, and softly turning the knob, pushed the door noiselessly open and entered.
A moment she stood listening to the low regular breathing of the sleeper. The reading-lamp shed a shaded glow on the pillow with its spread-out silver hair, and on the delicate hands clasped loosely on the coverlet. Shirley came close and looked down on the placid face. It was smooth as a child’s and a smile touched it lightly as if some pleasant sleep-thought had just laid rosy fingers on the dreaming lips. The light caught and sparkled from something bright that lay between her mother’s hands. It was the enamel brooch that held her own baby curl, and she saw suddenly that what she had all her life thought was a solid pendant, was now open locket-wise and that the two halves clasped a miniature. It came to her at once that the picture must be Sassoon’s, and a quick thrill of pity and yearning welled up through her own dejection. Stooping, she looked at it closely. She started as she did so, for the face on the little disk of ivory was that of John Valiant.