As he crouched there, half wishing the water were deep enough to drown him, be heard a low-voiced singing near by, and, taking a step presently, he saw a picture among the pine shadows. Alice Rothsay, with a red rose in her bosom, sat in the moss, and the green, thready grasses, looking fair as Titania, her small figure showing smaller by the boles and branches of the trees. She was hushing herself silent and smiling, her lucent eyes intent on a humming-bird that wandered in the flickering shade and shine of the woods. It foraged for a moment among the shrinking blossoms, the bold little robber! it snapped at a round bright drop dashed up by the fretted waters, and got a sip, half spray, half sunshine, that turned it clean tipsy; then it made a dart at the red rose in Alice Rothsay's bosom, and hung there, a little blue buzz with a long bill. The rose trembled over the girl's suppressed laughter, and the winged mite flung itself petulantly breast deep in the fragrant petals. Then it reeled away, scared at the bound her heart gave; for, looking up, she saw Verheyden. It was the first time they had met since his accident.
"I dare not pity you," she said; "the hand of God shows too plainly." But the moistened eyes, and the unsteadiness of her soft, loitering voice, contradicted the words she spoke.
He looked at her in a dazed, lost way, wondering who then might be deserving of pity.
"We miss you at church," she went on. "We have a different organist every Sunday, and I am not used to their accompaniments. I broke down last Sunday. Mrs. Wilder played, and at the sucipe that you always played legato, she threw in half a dozen bars of explosives. The 'deprecationem' was fired off, every syllable of it, as from a mortar. I jumped as if I'd been blown up. So few know how to accompany. It will be better when Laurie comes. But we want to see you at church, Verheyden."
His face lost its momentary gentleness. "I don't go to church now," he said; "that is, to what we call church. I've been invoking 'black spirits and white, blue spirits and gray'—all but the white. I've been calling back the soul of Mesmer. I could tell stories that would frighten you."
"Oh! no, you couldn't," she said. "'If armies in camp should stand together against me, my heart shall not fear.' I might fear for you, though. I have reason to fear for you when you give thought to such delusions."
Verheyden began defending himself with the impatience of one who knows his position to be weak, going over that hackneyed talk about progress and freedom of thought. "Ah!" she sighed, "there are heights and heights; and Babel is not Pisgah."
The fragment of woods in which they had been walking belonged to the estate of Monsieur Leon, at whose house Alice was visiting; and, as she saw the two approaching, madame herself came out to meet them. An amiable, worldly woman, a patroness of the arts, graceful, cordial, and full of charming little enthusiasms. Not least among her aesthetic devotions was that to the toilette, by the help of which she managed to appear forty instead or sixty.
She stepped to meet Verheyden with both her hands extended, tears swimming in her fine dusky eyes. "My dear friend!" she said. "At last you remember us. You are welcome. Where have you been all summer?"
"Summer?" repeated Verheyden. "I haven't seen any summer."