No. It looked, upon the face of it, as if there had been a mistake somewhere. Benis had despaired too soon!
This fateful thought had been crouching at the door of Desire's mind ever since Mary had ceased to be an abstraction. She had kept it out. She had refused to know that it was there. She had been happy in spite of it. But now, when its time was fully come, it made small work of her frail barriers. It blundered in, leering and triumphant.
Men have been mistaken before now. Men have turned aside in the very moment of victory. And Benis Spence was not a man who would beg or importune. How easily he might have taken for refusal what was, in effect, mere withdrawal. Had Mary retreated only that he might pursue? And had the Someone Else been No One Else at all?
If this were so, and it seemed at least possible, the retreating lady had been smartly punished. Serve her right—oh, serve her right a thousand times for having dared to trifle! Desire wasted no pity on her. But what of him? With merciless lucidity Desire's busy brain created the missing acts which might have brought the professor's tragedy of errors to a happy ending. It would have been so simple—if Benis had only waited. Even pursuit would not have been required of him. Mary, unpursued, would have come back; unasked, she might have offered. But Benis had not waited.
Desire saw all this in the time that it took her to go down-stairs. At the bottom of the stairs she faced its unescapable logic: if he were free now, he might be happy yet.
How blind they had both been! He to believe that love had passed; she to believe that love would never come. Desire paused with her hand upon the library door. He was there. She could hear him talking to Yorick. She had only to open the door ... but she did not open it. Yesterday the library had been her kingdom, the heart of her widening world. Now it was only a room in someone else's house. Yesterday she would have gone in swiftly—hiding her gladness in a little net of everyday words. But today she had no gladness and no words.
CHAPTER XXXI
Miss Davis had been in Bainbridge a week. Her cold was entirely better and her nerves, she said, much rested. "This is such a restful place," murmured Miss Davis, selecting her breakfast toast with care.
"I'm glad you find it so," said Aunt Caroline. "Though, with the club elections coming on next week—" she broke off to ask if Desire would have more coffee.