‘Must you go?’ Mariella smiled at her with a sort of sweet blankness. ‘Well—you must come again soon. Come often.’
‘I’ll see you to the door,’ said Julian. ‘I’m taking the boy in.’
Without another word or look Mariella went away; and he marched off into the house, carrying the child; and Judith followed him, sick at heart.
Everything had gone wrong. Martin and Roddy had not returned and she dared not seek them to say good-night. Alas, they would not care whether she did so or not since they had not been sufficiently interested in her to stay beside her. Even Martin did not want her, preferred Roddy. She had hoped to gain assurance enough to look at Roddy, once, calmly, and see him as he was; but in the few glances they had exchanged she had seen nothing but an unreality so poignant, so burning that it blurred her whole mind and forced her eyes to escape, helpless. To-night when she was in bed they would all come before her, haunting and tormenting, trebly indifferent and unpossessed now that this longed-for meeting was accomplished, a bitter and fruitless fact. Imagination at least had been fecund, it had fed itself:—but the reality was as sterile as stone. What might she have done, she wondered, that she had not done, how should she have looked in order to please them? Was it her clothes or her looks or her idiotic seriousness about college that had condemned her to them? Bleakly pondering, she followed Julian into the sitting room.
He sat down at the piano with the boy on his knee, and began softly playing. Judith stood beside him.
After a little the child flung his head back against Julian’s shoulder, raptly listening. When he did this Julian’s face smoothed itself out and all but smiled. He continued to play, then stopped and said:
‘Sit down. You needn’t go yet,’—and continued his quiet music.
To free his arms she gently took the child from him and set him on her own lap, where he sat motionless and as if unconscious of the change.
Gradually as she watched the crooked fingers sliding along the keys from chord to chord, and saw around her the familiar room, the past stole over her. He was the boy Julian and she the half-dreaming privileged listener; and as if there had been no gap in their knowledge of each other they sat side by side in unselfconscious intimacy. What had there been to fear? She saw now that she would always be able to pick him up just where she had left him, and find him unchanged to her; she could say anything to him without danger of mockery or rebuff. But he had always been the easiest: the sense of blood-relationship was tempered in him by his critical intelligence; and he was always prepared at least to sharpen his wits against the stranger, if not to befriend him.
He paused and she said: