At last the swift soft pad of Delphine’s feet in the dust of the road! Then in another moment, breathing hard, for he had sensed the super-importance of the errand and had flown through the streets, the lad laid the envelope in her hand. Her name was inscribed on it in Calmiden’s handwriting.
Julie tore it open. Short, like a telegram, it burned through her brain. “I can not come, now. Sometime you will hear from me.”
That was all. A masterpiece of the enigmatic, meaning anything or nothing at all. Julie sat down and studied it out for a shred of hope or help it might contain; but at last, with tears of loneliness and despair in her throat, she gave it up. Calmiden did not mean to come back. Of that she was now convinced. She had injured him, and he had told her over and over with unmistakable directness that he did not forgive. From him this answer was inevitable. There was no appeal from it. Not even her letter had weighed in the issue.
Time went mercilessly on. The term was drawing towards its end. There were now only two pupils left in her once ardently conceived shrine of uplift. One of these was of course Delphine—the other an undersized youth who found it completely impossible to escape him.
She wondered how she had managed to be so happy once; or so independent in her aims. Those aims had now become almost obscured. One can’t go on greatly believing when the edifices one has sought to raise to the gods are smitten by lightning. Julie’s once fervid spirit was becoming becalmed. She couldn’t understand anything at all—a dark veil seemed to be stretched before her eyes. She longed, and yet dreaded to get off the stage of this drama.
The bachelors had moved their establishment down the hill, to the very house that Julie upon her introduction to Nahal had occupied. The Plaza had become too congested, and the Reyes had rented their house to the Military Government. Julie did not see Calmiden; he contrived absolutely to keep out of her way.
Finally they passed each other one day on the street. Julie turned white, and a spasm crossed Calmiden’s grim, gray face. As their eyes met, her blood congealed. For out of this brooding face nothing of the old Kenneth looked. One hard passion had conquered that face and turned it to stone. Right there the truth that she had paradoxically refused to receive stared her in the eyes.
He did not speak, and neither did she. A ghastly encounter—the meeting of their dead selves! Frightened and hopeless, Julie hurried on when she saw that Calmiden was to make no sign. He had closed definitely his strange soul.
Julie’s reason was beginning to point out inexorably that Calmiden was a great deal more to blame than she had thought. The questionableness of his permitting Purcell to say in his presence anything whatever about her—however shattering to his personal romance, or of his allowing his anger and outraged pride to get the better of him before he had demanded an explanation of her, had not at all balanced, in his mind, the fact that in her blistering letter she had told him that he was the worst possible conception of a cad. She knew that Calmiden had sought out the Treasurer, and that they had fought brutally in Purcell’s quarters; but even there he had accorded her enemy, however violently, the chance for a vindication that he would not give her. Also she knew that, although he had fought her accuser, belatedly, he still believed secretly a great deal of what that accuser had had to say.
He had caused her to suffer a great deal. He had brutally broken her pride, and had done it wilfully, hoping to make her contemptible to herself. It came over her in a great moment of proud anger and relief that she had never actually cared for him. He had succeeded in swerving her out of her path, he had quenched her torch, and helped to place her in the failure where she now found herself. Her soul, for a long time to come, would scorch with the hurts he and Nahal had inflicted.