She broke off in the act of withdrawal and turned to him. Her blue eyes were tearless but very sad. “I loved you dearly when you were very little,” she said simply. “I’ve never quite forgotten that. I suddenly realized that, if I waited any longer, I could never come. I think it was a cruel and foolish thing for me to do, and I’m a little ashamed of it; but—kiss me, Peter.”
Before he obeyed, he clutched at one more straw. “You won’t see old Martin?”
“I said good-bye to him a great many years ago.” She smiled. “I had no one to see in America except you. No—there’s a cab waiting. Good-bye.”
He kissed her then. It was clear to him that he might only watch her go. He saw her stop to rouse the old servant who waited in the hall. Then she passed, with strange grace, out of his life.
There was only one tone to take with Marty, who arrived, as always, late and breathless. “She’s the most charming woman I’ve ever met, and it’s the devil’s own luck that she had to go straight on to Vancouver to get a steamer back. My father—who is apparently a charmer, by the way—is very ill. She’s wonderful. It’s the biggest thing that has ever happened to me. She’s made everything as right as right. But I can’t tell you about it. After twenty years—you understand, old man——”
It was less the loyal friend than the loyal son; but he was still, dining that night at Plon’s (he wondered where the deuce she was dining), very much under her dominion. She had brought with her a rare illumination. He would never forget her voice and her veiled eyes. He hadn’t dreamed a woman could suggest her love in so many silent ways. She just was adoration, implicit and incarnate. It was tremendous to have seen it. The white light it threw on Lawrence’s bride! The white light it threw, for that matter, on all the women he knew! He felt himself bursting with knowledge.
It was not until after dinner, indeed, that he realized just how wonderful in another way she had been, and with how little knowledge of another sort she had left him. She had told him absolutely nothing. So far as he was concerned, her narrative had only concealed events. He couldn’t remember whether New Zealand had followed or preceded Chile; and his sincere impression was that it didn’t matter, even to them. Anything that in all those years had mattered, had been dropped away out of sight between her sentences. If he had been by his hour both racked and inebriated (for that was what his state of tension amounted to), it was not because of any facts she had given him. She had not even answered his plain questions. She had left him in dismay as soon as he had begun to ask them. He saw that now, though in his simplicity he hadn’t seen it before. He had been sacrificed again, as he had always been sacrificed. His mystery was still his mystery, and he was still left alone with his monstrous hypotheses. He wouldn’t have missed it for anything—not even for good old Marty. But he turned to Marty at last with compunction.