Verena was silent a moment. 'Your logic is most as good as a woman's. Do change your mind and go to see her now,' she went on. 'She will probably be at home by the time you get to Charles Street. If she was a little strange, a little stiff with you before (I know just how she must have been), all that will be different to-day.'
'Why will it be different?'
'Oh, she will be easier, more genial, much softer.'
'I don't believe it,' said Ransom; and his scepticism seemed none the less complete because it was light and smiling.
'She is much happier now—she can afford not to mind you.'
'Not to mind me? That's a nice inducement for a gentleman to go and see a lady!'
'Well, she will be more gracious, because she feels now that she is more successful.'
'You mean because she has brought you out? Oh, I have no doubt that has cleared the air for her immensely, and you have improved her very much. But I have got a charming impression out here, and I have no wish to put another—which won't be charming, anyhow you arrange it—on top of it.'
'Well, she will be sure to know you have been round here, at any rate,' Verena rejoined.
'How will she know, unless you tell her?'
'I tell her everything,' said the girl; and now as soon as she had spoken, she blushed. He stood before her, tracing a figure on the mosaic pavement with his cane, conscious that in a moment they had become more intimate. They were discussing their affairs, which had nothing to do with the heroic symbols that surrounded them; but their affairs had suddenly grown so serious that there was no want of decency in their lingering there for the purpose. The implication that his visit might remain as a secret between them made them both feel it differently. To ask her to keep it so would have been, as it seemed to Ransom, a liberty, and, moreover, he didn't care so much as that; but if she were to prefer to do so such a preference would only make him consider the more that his expedition had been a success.
'Oh, then, you can tell her this!' he said in a moment.
'If I shouldn't, it would be the first——' And Verena checked herself.
'You must arrange that with your conscience,' Ransom went on, laughing.
They came out of the hall, passed down the steps, and emerged from the Delta, as that portion of the college precinct is called. The afternoon had begun to wane, but the air was filled with a pink brightness, and there was a cool, pure smell, a vague breath of spring.
'Well, if I don't tell Olive, then you must leave me here,' said Verena, stopping in the path and putting out a hand of farewell.
'I don't understand. What has that to do with it? Besides I thought you said you
'Well, I want to be free—to do as I think best. And, if there is a chance of my keeping it back, there mustn't be anything more—there must not, Mr. Ransom, really.'
'Anything more? Why, what are you afraid there will be—if I should simply walk home with you?'
'I must go alone, I must hurry back to mother,' she said, for all reply. And she again put out her hand, which he had not taken before.
Of course he took it now, and even held it a moment; he didn't like being dismissed, and was thinking of pretexts to linger. 'Miss Birdseye said you would convert me, but you haven't yet,' it came into his head to say.
'You can't tell yet; wait a little. My influence is peculiar; it sometimes comes out a long time afterwards!' This speech, on Verena's part, was evidently perfunctory, and the grandeur of her self-reference jocular; she was much more serious when she went on quickly, 'Do you mean to say Miss Birdseye promised you that?'
'Oh yes. Talk about influence! you should have seen the influence I obtained over her.'
'Well, what good will it do, if I'm going to tell Olive about your visit?'
'Well, you see, I think she hopes you won't. She believes you are going to convert me privately—so that I shall blaze forth, suddenly, out of the darkness of Mississippi, as a first-class proselyte: very effective and dramatic.'
Verena struck Basil Ransom as constantly simple, but there were moments when her candour seemed to him preternatural. 'If I thought that would be the effect, I might make an exception,' she remarked, speaking as if such a result were, after all, possible.
'Oh, Miss Tarrant, you will convert me enough, any way,' said the young man.
'Enough? What do you mean by enough?'
'Enough to make me terribly unhappy.'
She looked at him a moment, evidently not understanding; but she tossed him a retort at a venture, turned away, and took her course homeward. The retort was that if he should be unhappy it would serve him right—a form of words that committed her to nothing. As he returned to Boston he saw how curious he should be to learn whether she had betrayed him, as it were, to Miss Chancellor. He might learn through Mrs. Luna; that would almost reconcile him to going to see her again. Olive would mention it in writing to her sister, and Adeline would repeat the complaint. Perhaps she herself would even make him a scene about it; that would be, for him, part of the unhappiness he had foretold to Verena Tarrant.
XXVI
'Mrs. Henry Burrage, at home Wednesday evening, March 26th, at half-past nine o'clock.' It was in consequence of having received a card with these words inscribed upon it that Basil Ransom presented himself, on the evening she had designated, at the house of a lady he had never heard of before. The account of the relation of effect to cause is not complete, however, unless I mention that the card bore, furthermore, in the left-hand lower
