“I don’t know. She looked Italian.”
There was a long silence and at last it was Mary, the practical Mary, who spoke. “You must wonder why I came here, Philip ... after ... after not seeing you at all for all this time.”
He looked at her slowly, as if half-asleep. “I don’t know. I hadn’t even thought of it, Mary ... anything seems possible to-night, anything seems possible in this queer park.” And then, stirring himself, he reached across the table and touched her hand. She did not draw it away, and the touch gave him the strangest sense of a fathomless intimacy which went back and back into their childhood, into the days when they had played together in the tree-house. She had belonged to him always, only he had been stupid never to have understood it. He could have spoken out once long ago. If only he, the real Philip, had been born a little sooner, they would both have been saved.
And then, suddenly, he knew why she had come, and he was frightened.
He said, “You heard about my father?”
She started a little, and said, “No.”
“He came back to-night. It was awful, Mary. If he’d only stayed away! If he’d never have come back....”
So he told her the whole story, even to his suspicion that his father was a liar, and had deserted him and his mother twenty-six years before. He told her of the long agony of the reunion, describing his father in detail. And at the end, he said, “You see why I wish he’d never come back. You do see, don’t you, Mary ... if he’d stayed away, I’d never have thought of him at all, or at least only as my mother thought of him. But he isn’t like that at all. I don’t see how she can take him back ... how she can bear to have him about.”
She wanted to cry out, “Don’t you see, Philip? Don’t you see the kind of woman she is? If you don’t see, nothing can save you. She’s worse than he is, because he’s harmless.” But she only said quietly, “Perhaps she’s in love with him. If that’s true, it explains anything.”
“Maybe it’s that. She must be in love with him.”