“Glorious! But I missed you awfully, old fellow—after I’d made it all right with you—and I wish you had been with me. The trout bit like fish that had nothing on their consciences; and there was an old couple over there near the lake who supplied me with bread and milk; they could have gone into your Annals just as they are, without a change of clothing. They had three sons killed in the last fight before Petersburg; I’ll tell you all about them.”
“You’re back later than you expected,” said Easton.
“Yes; I wanted a few nights more on the pine boughs, and so we waited for an early start this morning. We broke camp about four o’clock, and started for West Pekin with the sun. But he beat us. I never knew heat like it; it was a good thing for me that I had been toughened by a few days outdoors. We stopped for a wash in a brook about three miles back on the road, and then we steamed along again. I reached the hotel pretty soon after you left, and put on the thinnest clothes I had; and then I started for the farm. They had spied you making in this direction, and their information was so accurate that I hadn’t any trouble in finding you.”
In spite of a visible effort to be at ease there was a note of constraint in Gilbert’s voluble talk, and he seemed eager to find some matter not personal to them. He recurred to those old people at the lake, and told about them; he described the place where he had camped; he gave characteristic stories of the man whom he had taken with him and whose whole philosophy of life he had got at in the last three days.
At the end of it all Easton said: “I’m glad you don’t think I meant you any harm, Gilbert, and I’ve wanted to tell you so. But for once in my life I didn’t seem to be able to do the thing I ought. I couldn’t understand my own action. It was mortifying to think that I could have been so little myself as to have talked of that matter, and I was ashamed to recur to it; I couldn’t. I don’t see now what I can say. There is nothing to say except that I was entirely guiltless in wounding you, and that I am altogether to blame for it.”
Gilbert smiled at the paradox. “Oh, never mind it, Easton; I tell you it’s all right. I really saw the thing in its true light at first; and if the devil hadn’t been in me, I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Nobody blames you.”
There was ever so slight an implication of superiority in the last words which stung Easton, however unmeant he knew it to be, and he rejoined anxiously, “Yes, but I was to blame; it’s unjust not to blame me.”
Gilbert had thrown himself back on the flat rock, and was looking at the leaves above, with the back of his head resting in the hollow of his clasped hands. He turned his face a little toward Easton, and asked, with a smile: “Aren’t you making it a little difficult? Let it all go, my dear old fellow. There never was anything of it. Why should we make something of it now?”
“How can I let it go?” cried Easton. “I either wronged you and was to blame, or else was not to blame because I was simply the helpless means of wronging you. It leaves me in a very cruel position; I must refuse your forgiveness or accept it at the cost of one who was entirely innocent. If I let it go as it is, I skulk behind a woman, who, as far as you are concerned, was really the victim of my own folly and weakness.”
Gilbert rose to a sitting posture and looked coldly at his friend. “I want you to take notice,” he said, “that I have mentioned no one, that I have tried to pass the matter all over. You have no right to put it as you do.” His eyes began to flash, and he went on recklessly, “And if you come to talk of cruel positions, I leave you to say what you can for a man who will let his friend go as long as you have let me go, without saying the word that might have removed his sense of a cruelly injurious slight.”