For a week Jerry kept away from the market-house; Nan knew he had been out of town, and, failing to see him, would assume that he was still away. He could not face her; it would be a merciful thing if he never saw her again. Eaton he would avoid; his friend must never know of his hopeless passion. Nan and Eaton must begin their married life wholly ignorant that he had ever looked upon Nan as anything more than a good friend. Phrases out of novels he had read assisted him in the definition of his attitude toward her and Eaton. “Unworthy of the woman he loved,” and “climbed slowly, painfully, to the sublime heights of a great renunciation.” He was unworthy; he had known that all along; and he would give her up to his best friend with a beautiful magnanimity. The fiction with which he was familiar had not lacked in noble examples of just such splendid sacrifice. If death failed to end his misery, he would live on, sadly, but manfully, and on every anniversary of their meeting on the river bank, he would send her a rose—a single beautiful rose—always exactly the same, and it would puzzle her greatly and make her wonder; but she would never guess that it was from one who had loved her in the long ago.
He had made no sign to Eaton, not even to acknowledge the theater invitation; and when one day he ran into the lawyer in the bank lobby he was about to pass him hurriedly when the familiar “Ah, Jerry!” arrested him. He swallowed hard; it was not easy to meet his friend with the air of sweet resignation and submission to inexorable fate that he had been cultivating.
“An overdraft?” Eaton suggested in his usual tone. “Nothing else could account for your woeful countenance! I didn’t know you were in town. Just in, I suppose, from a flight into the remoter recesses of the Commonwealth.”
“Well, I’ve been back a few days,” Jerry confessed reluctantly; “but I’ve been too busy to come around. I meant to call you up about that invitation; I didn’t get it until after the show.”
“We missed you; I had wanted you to meet my sister. In fact, I’d rather prepared her for the meeting—led up to it, warned her of your native flavor. She’s still with me. You’re working yourself to death; it’s in your eye. Can’t you come up Tuesday night and dine with us? I’ll see if we can’t get Mrs. Copeland and Nan to come in. They’ve been seeing something of Florence. You’ve seen Nan—”
“No; I haven’t seen her,” Jerry replied, a little resentfully, as though Eaton ought to know why Nan had become invisible so far as Jeremiah Amidon was concerned.
“She’s another victim of overwork,” Eaton remarked carelessly, but behind his glasses there was a gleam of humor. “Not quarreling, I hope? I confess that at times Nan is a trifle provoking, but she means nothing by it. You must give the benefit of all doubts to a girl who is just emerging from a severe ordeal—settling herself into a new manner of life. It’s wonderful; really amazing how she’s coming on. We shall be dining at seven. Please don’t make it necessary for me to explain a second scorning of my hospitality to my sister. She’d begin to think you a myth, like Jupiter and the rest of the immortals.”
“Thanks; I’ll be there,” Jerry answered solemnly. Then he watched Eaton’s retreating figure shame-facedly. He was acting abominably toward Eaton.
The Pembrokes had gone to Florida for the spring months, and Eaton had taken their house that he might indulge in a round of dinners and a ball that proved to be the season’s smartest event. These social activities Jerry had taken as another sign of Eaton’s approaching marriage. And Jerry had resented, as an attack upon his personal rights, Eaton’s transfer from the rooms where he had always been so accessible, to the big house where visitors were received by the Pembrokes’ butler—a formidable person who, he fancied, regarded him with a hostile eye.
Jerry presented himself at the hour appointed, wearing the crown of his martyrdom, which, if he had known it, was highly unbecoming. As he had walked around the block twice to prepare himself for the ordeal, he was late, and stood uncomfortably in the drawing-room door, quite unnoticed, while the sister (whose back he distrusted) finished a story she had been telling. But spying him, Eaton rose and greeted him cordially.