"She has seen them so before." And she gave me her hand, which I kissed.
"Poor Little Miss!" I said, still holding it.
"Not poor now—you have given me back so much. I can believe again—I can believe almost as much as Jim."
But I released her hand. Though her eyes had not quitted mine, their look was one of utter friendliness.
[CHAPTER XXVII]
HOW A TRUCE WAS TROUBLESOME
In the days and nights that followed this interview I associated rather more than usual with Jim. It seemed well to do so. I needed to learn once more some of the magnificent belief that I had taught him in days when my own was stronger. Close companionship with a dog of the truly Greek spirit, under circumstances in which I now found myself, was bound to be of a tonic value. I had seen, almost at the moment of Miss Kate's disclosure, that a change was to come in our relations. Perhaps I was wild enough at the moment to hope that it might be a change for the better; but this was only in the first flush of it—of a moment ill adapted for close reasoning. It took no great while to convince me that the discovery in which we had cooperated was of a character necessarily to put me from her even farther than she had at first chosen to put me—and that was far enough, Heaven knows.
In effect I had given back her love to her, a love she had for ten years unjustly doubted. That was the cold truth of it for one who knew women. One who could doubt the tenth year as poignantly as she had doubted in the first—would she not in bitterness regret her doubt ten other years, and sweetly mourn her lost love still another ten? She who had let me be little enough to her while she felt her wound—how much less could I be when the hurt was healed? Before she might have been in want. At least that was conceivable. Now her want was met. Not only was there this to fill her heart, but remorse, the tenderest a woman may know, it seems to me—remorse for undeserved suspicion.
In a setting less prosaic than Little Arcady, where events might be of a story-fitness, that lover would have been alive by a happy chance, estranged by the misunderstanding but splendidly faithful, and I should have been helper and interested witness to an ideal reconciliation; thereafter to play out my game with a full heart, though with an exterior placidly unconcerned. But with us events halt always a little short of true romance. They are unexcitingly usual.
I would have to play out my game full heartedly, nursing my powers of belief back to their one-time vigor; nothing would occur to ease my lot—not even an occasion to pretend that I gave my blessing to a reunited and happy pair. Miss Kate could go on believing. Unwittingly I had given her the stuff for belief. I, too, must go on believing, and providing my own material, as had ever been my lot; all of which was why my dog seemed my most profitable companion at this time. His every bark at a threatening baby-carriage a block away, each fresh time he believed sincerely that a rubber shoe was engaging in deadly struggle with him, taxing all his forces to subdue it, each time he testified with sensitive, twitching nostrils that the earth is good with innumerable scents, each streaking of his glad-tongued white length over yellowing fields designed solely for his recreation held for me a certain soothing value. And when in quiet moments he assured me with melting gaze that I was a being to challenge the very heart of love—in some measure, at least, did my soul gain strength from his own.