Tales of Men and Ghosts

“Three years,” he repeated, musingly taking up her words. “I’ve so often wondered what they’d brought you.”

She lifted her head with a quick blush, and the terrified wish that he should not, at the cost of all his notions of correctness, lapse into the blunder of becoming “personal.”

“You’ve wondered?” She smiled back bravely.

“Do you suppose I haven’t?” His look dwelt on her. “Yes, Idaresay that was what you thought of me.”

She had her answer pat—“Why, frankly, you know, I didn’t think of you.” But the mounting tide of her poor dishonored memories swept it indignantly away. If it was his correctness toignore, it could never be hers to disavow.

“ Was that what you thought of me?” she heard himrepeat in a tone of sad insistence; and at that, with a quick lift of her head, she resolutely answered: “How could I know what to think? I had no word from you.”

If she had expected, and perhaps almost hoped, that this answer would create a difficulty for him, the gaze of quiet fortitude with which he met it proved that she had underestimatedhis resources.

“No, you had no word. I kept my vow,” he said.

“Your vow?”

“That you shouldn’t have a word—not a syllable. Oh, I kept it through everything!”

Lizzie’s heart was sounding in her ears the old confused rumor of the sea of life, but through it she desperately tried to distinguish the still small voice of reason.

“What was your vow? Why shouldn’t I have had asyllable from you?”

He sat motionless, still holding her with a look so gentle that it almost seemed forgiving.

Then abruptly he rose, and crossing the space between them, sat down in a chair at her side. The deliberation of his movement might have implied a forgetfulness of changed conditions, and Lizzie, as if thus viewing it, drew slightly back; but he appeared not to notice her recoil, and his eyes, at last leaving her face, slowly and approvingly made the round of the small bright drawing-room. “This is charming. Yes, things have changed foryou,” he said.

A moment before she had prayed that he might be spared the error of a vain return upon the past. It was as if all her retrospective tenderness, dreading to see him at such a disadvantage, rose up to protect him from it. But his evasiveness exasperated her, and suddenly she felt the inconsistent desire tohold him fast, face to face with his own words.

Before she could reiterate her question, however, he had mether with another.

“You did think of me, then? Why are you afraid totell me that you did?”

The unexpectedness of the challenge wrung an indignant cry from her.

“Didn’t my letters tell you so enough?”

“Ah, your letters!” Keeping her gaze on his in a passion ofunrelenting fixity, she could detect in him no confusion, not theleast quiver of a sensitive nerve. He only gazed back at her more sadly.

“They went everywhere with me—your letters,” he said.

“Yet you never answered them.” At last the accusation trembled to her lips.

“Yet I never answered them.”

“Did you ever so much as read them, I wonder?”

All the demons of self-torture were up in her now, and she loosed them on him, as if to escape from their rage.

Deering hardly seemed to hear her question. He merely shifted his attitude, leaning a little nearer to her, but without attempting, by the least gesture, to remind her of the privilegeswhich such nearness had once implied.

“There were beautiful, wonderful things in them,” he said, smiling.

She felt herself stiffen under his smile.

“You’ve waited three years to tell me so!”

He looked at her with grave surprise. “And do you resent mytelling you even now?”

His parries were incredible. They left her with a breathless sense of thrusting at emptiness, and a desperate, almost vindictive desire to drive him against thewall and pin him there.

“No. Only I wonder you should take the trouble to tell me, when at the time—”

And now, with a sudden turn, he gave her the final surprise of meeting her squarely on her own ground.

“When at the time I didn’t? But how could I—at thetime?”

“Why couldn’t you? You’ve not yet told me?”

He gave her again his look of disarming patience. “Do I need to? Hasn’t my whole wretched story told you?”

“Told me why you never answered my letters?”

“Yes, since I could only answer them in one way—by protesting my love and my longing.”

There was a long pause of resigned expectancy on his part, on hers, of a wild confused reconstruction of her