"Good-by," Falkner said. "I shall come to-morrow."
At the gate he met Pole, lightly swinging a neat green bag, his gloves in his hand. Larry stopped to talk, but Falkner, with a short, "Pleasant afternoon," kept on. Somehow the sight of Pole made the thing he had just learned all the worse.
Thus it happened that in the space of a few weeks Margaret knew Falkner more intimately than Isabelle had ever known him or ever could know him. Two beings meeting in this illusive, glimmering world of ours may come to a ready knowledge of each other, as two travellers on a dark road, who have made the greater part of the stormy journey alone. It would be difficult to record the growth of that inner intimacy,—so much happening in wordless moments or so much being bodied forth in little words that would be as meaningless as newspaper print. But these weeks of the child's invalidism, there was growing within them another life that no one shared or would have understood. When Larry observed, "That bounder is always here," Margaret did not seem to hear. Already the food that the "bounder" had given her parched self was too precious to lose. She had begun to live again the stifled memories, the life laid away,—to talk of her girlhood, of her Virginia hills, her people.
And Falkner had told her something of those earlier years in the Rockies, when he had lived in the world of open spaces and felt the thrill of life, but never a word of what had passed since he had left the canons and the peaks. Sometimes these days there was a gleam in his dark eyes, a smile on the bearded lips that indicated the reopening of the closed book once more. His fellow-units in the industrial world might not see it; but Margaret felt it. Here was a human being pressed into the service of the machine and held there, at pay, powerless to extract himself, sacrificed. And she saw what there was beneath the mistake; she felt the pioneer blood, like her own, close to the earth in its broad spaces, living under the sky in a new land. She saw the man that should be, that once was, that must be again! And in this world of their other selves, which had been denied them, these two touched hands. They needed little explanation.
Rarely Margaret spoke of her present life, and then with irony, as if an inner and unsentimental honesty compelled utterance: "You see," she remarked once when her husband called her, "we dress for dinner because when we started in New York we belonged to the dining-out class. If we didn't keep up the habit, we should lose our self-respect…. My neck is thin and I don't look well in evening dress. But that makes no matter…. We have prayers on Sunday morning; religion is part of the substantial life."…
Conny had said once, hearing Margaret rail like this: "She ought to make a better bluff, or get out,—not guy old Larry like that; it isn't decent, embarrasses one so. You can't guy him, too."…
But Falkner understood how the acid of her daily life eating into her had touched, at these times, a sensitive nerve and compelled such self-revelations.
* * * * *
It was Falkner who first spoke to the Poles about Dr. Renault. In some way he had heard of the surgeon and learned of the wonderful things he had done.
"Anyhow it is worth while seeing him. It is best to try everything."