“Oh, my dear, my dear!” she said, with tears on her cheeks.
Perhaps, after all, forgetting the past and the things that had been between them, they could come together again and be happy. But he was tortured by a dread of being unfair to Bert. If she did still care for him, if he had any rights.—“Of course he has rights. He’s your—I never thought that I could talk like this to a woman who hadn’t any right to listen to me.”
“Hush! Of course I have a right to listen to you. I have every right to do as I please with myself.”
The tragedy that shook her was that it was true, that all the passion and beauty of her old love for Bert was dead, lying like a corpse in her heart, never to be awakened and never utterly forgotten. “I will be free,” she promised, knowing that she never would be. But in her deepest tenderness toward Paul she could shut her eyes to that.
The promise made him happy. Despite his doubts, his restless conscience not quite silenced, he was happy, and his happiness was reflected in her. Something of magic revived, making the moment glamorous. She need not think of the future; she need made no promises beyond that one. “I will be free.” A year, a year at least. Then they would plan.
For the moment her tenderness enfolded him, who loved her so much, so much that she could never give him enough to repay him. It came to her in a clear flash of thought through one of their silences that the maternal quality in a woman’s love is not so much due to the mother in the woman as to the child in the man.
“You dear!” she said.
He had to go at last. The morning train for Ripley, but he would write her every day. “And you’ll see—about it—right away?”
“Yes, right away.” The leaves of the rose-vines over the porch rustled softly; a scented petal floated down through the moonlight. “Goodbye, dear.”
“Goodbye.” He hesitated, holding her hand. “Oh, Helen—sweetheart—” Then, quickly, he went without kissing her.
She entered a house filled with a silence that turned to her many faces, and switching out the little lamp she sat a long time in the darkness, looking out at the moonlit lawn. She was tired. It was good to be alone in the stillness, not to think, but to feel herself slowly growing quiet and composed again around a quietly happy heart.
Something of the glow went with her to the office next morning, stayed with her all day, while she talked sub-soils, water-depths, prices, terms, while she answered her letters, wrote her next week’s advertising, corrected proofs. The news in the papers was disquieting; it appeared that the cloud over Europe was growing blacker. How long would it be if war did come before its effects reached her territory, slowly cut off her sales? Ted Collin’s bill for gasoline was out of all reason; there was a heated discussion in the office, telephone messages to Clark in San Francisco. Business details engulfed her.
On Wednesday she took her difficult prospect to the Sacramento lands in the machine. He was hard to handle; salesmen for other tracts had clouded the clear issue. She fell back on the old expedient of showing him all those other tracts herself, with a fair-seeming impartiality that damned them by indirection. There was no time for dreaming during those hard three days; toiling over dusty fields with a soil-augur, skilfully countering objections before they took form, nursing an engine that coughed on three cylinders, dragging the man at last by sheer force of will power to the point of signing on the dotted line. She came exhausted into the Sacramento hotel late the third night, with no thought in her mind but a bath and bed.
Stopping at the telegraph counter to wire the firm that the sale was closed, she heard a remembered voice at her elbow, and turned.
“Mr. Monroe! You’re up here too! How’s it going?” She gave him a dust-grimed hand.
“Well, I’m not complaining, Mrs. Kennedy—not complaining. Just closed thirty-five acres. And how are you? Fortune smiling, I hope?”
“Just got in from the tract. Sold a couple of twenty-acre pieces.”
“Well, well, is that so? Fine work, fine work! Keep it up. It’s a pleasure to see a young lady doing so well. Well, well, and so you’ve been out on the tract! I wonder if you’ve seen Gilbert yet?” His shrewd old gossip-loving eyes were upon her. She turned to her message on the counter, and after a pause of gazing blindly at it, she scrawled, “H. D. Kennedy,” clearly below it. “Send collect,” she said to the girl, and over her shoulder, “Gilbert who? Not my husband?”
Yes. Monroe had run across him in San Francisco, and he was looking well, very well indeed. Had asked about her; Monroe had told him she was in San José. “But if you were on the tract, no doubt he failed to find you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been lost to the world for three days. Showed my prospect every inch of land between here and Patterson. You know how it is. I’m all in. Well, goodbye. Good luck.” As she crossed the lobby to the elevator she heard her heels clicking on the mosaic floor, and knew she was walking with her usual quick, firm step.
XVIII
Sleep was impossible. Helen’s exhausted nerves reacted in feverish tenseness to the shock of this unexpected news of Bert. From long experience she knew that in this half-delirious state she could not trust her reasoning, must not accept seriously its conclusions, but
