The Side Of The Angels Part 45

He took an uneasy turn up and down the balcony. "Look here, Lois; have you any particular motive in bringing this up now?"

"Yes, Thor. It's the same motive I had a few weeks ago, only that I haven't been sure of it till to-night. I want you"--she hesitated, but urged herself on--"I want you--to let me go away."

"Go away?" he cried, sharply. "Go away where?"

"I don't know yet. Anywhere. There are one or two visits I might make--or I could find a place. That part of it doesn't matter."

"But when you wanted to go away a few weeks ago--"

"It was to--to take _her_. I shouldn't need to do that now, because she's better. In a way she's all right--all right, only changed."

It was to make a show of not being afraid to mention Rosie that he said, "Changed in what way?"

"Well, you'll see." She decided that for his own sake it was kindness to be cruel, and so added: "Changed to a healthier frame of mind. She's very much ashamed of what she tried to do, and wants to begin again on a--on a less foolish basis. So," she continued, reverting to her former point, "my going away wouldn't now have anything to do with her. It would be on my own account. I want to--to think."

"Think about what?"

"Well, chiefly about you."

He knew they were nearing the heart of the question, and so went up to it boldly. "To wonder--whether or not--I--love you? Is that it?"

"N-no; not exactly." She allowed a second to pa.s.s before letting slip the words: "Rather the other way."

"The other way--how?"

She spoke very softly. "Whether or not--I love _you_."

"Oh!" His tone was as soft as hers, but with the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n he moved his big hands about his body like a man feeling for his wound. "I thought you did."

"Yes, I thought so, too--till--till lately. Perhaps I do, even now. I don't know. It's what I want to get away for--to think--to see. I can't do either when you're so near me. You--you overwhelm me--you crush me. I don't get the free use of my mind."

He turned again to pace the narrow limits of the balcony. "If you ever did love me, Lois," he said, in a voice she hardly recognized because of the new thrill in it, "I've done nothing to deserve the withdrawal of--of your affection."

She answered while still keeping her eyes absently on Spica's white effulgence. "I know you haven't, Thor dear. But that's not the point.

It's rather that I have to go back and--and revise everything--form new conceptions."

He paused, standing behind her. "I don't think I get your idea."

"No, probably not. You couldn't without knowing what it all used to mean to me."

"_Used_ to mean?"

"Yes, Thor; used to mean in a way that it doesn't now, and never can any more."

There was pain in his voice as he said, "That's hard, Lois--d.a.m.nably hard."

"I know, Thor dear. I wouldn't say it if I hadn't made up my mind that I must--that I ought to. I've had a great shock--which has been in its way a great humiliation--but I could go on keeping it to myself if I hadn't come to the conclusion that it's best for you to know. Men are so slow to fathom what their wives are thinking of--"

"Well, then, tell me."

She turned slowly round from her contemplation of the stars, a hand on each side grasping the low rail against which she leaned. The spangles on a scarf over her bare shoulders glittered iridescently in the light streaming from her room. Of Thor she could discern little more than the whiteness of his face and of his evening shirt-front from the obscurity in which he kept himself. A minute or more elapsed before she went on.

"You see, Thor, I didn't fall in love with you first of all for your own sake; it was because--because I thought you'd fallen in love with me.

That's a sort of confession, isn't it? It may be something I ought to be ashamed of, and perhaps I am--a little. But you'd understand how it could happen if you were to realize what it was to me that a man should fall in love with me at all."

He tried to interrupt her, but she insisted on going on in her own way.

"I wasn't attractive. I never had been. During the years when I was going out I never received what people call attentions--not from any one. I don't say that I didn't suffer on account of it. I did--but I'd begun to take the suffering philosophically. I'd made up my mind that no one would ever care for me, and I was getting used to the idea--when--when you came."

Because her voice trembled she pressed her handkerchief against her lips, while Thor stood silent in the darkness of the far end of the balcony.

"And when you did come, Thor dear, it couldn't but seem to me the most amazing thing that ever happened. I didn't allow myself to think that you were in love with me--I didn't dare--at first. It made me happy that you should think it worth while just to come and see me, to talk to me, to tell me some of the things you hoped to do. That in itself--"

She broke off again, losing something of her self-command. In the stress of physical agitation she drew the spangled scarf over her shoulders and stepped forward into the shaft of light that fell through the open French window of her room.

"But, finally, Thor, I came to the conclusion that you must love me. I couldn't explain your kindness in any other way. Believe me, I didn't accept that way till--till it seemed the only one, but when I did, well, it wasn't merely pride and happiness that I felt--it was something more." A sob in her throat obliged her to interrupt herself again, while the croaking of frogs continued. "And so, Thor dear, love came to me, too. It came because I thought you brought it; but now that I see you didn't bring it, you can understand why I should be in doubt as to--as to whether or not--it really did come."

Since he recognized the futility of making an immediate response, they stood confronting each other in silence.

She took another step nearer him. "But what I'm not in any doubt about at all is the scorn I feel for myself for ever having cherished the delusion. If I'd been a woman with--with more claim, let us say, to being loved--"

"Lois, for G.o.d's sake, don't say that!"

"But I must say it, Thor. It's at the bottom of all I mean. I was weak and foolish enough to think that in spite of the things I lacked a man had given me his heart--when he hadn't."

"Lois, I can't stand this. Please don't go on."

"But I have to stand it, Thor. I have to stand it day and night, without ever getting away from the thought of it. I have to go back and puzzle and wonder and speculate as to why you did what you've done to me. I see things this way, Thor: There was a time when you thought you might come to care for me. You really thought it. And then--something happened--and you were not so sure. Later, you felt that you couldn't--that you never would. But the something that happened happened the wrong way for you--and papa broke down as he did--and I was in danger of being poor--and you were kind and generous--and--you weren't very happy as things were--you told me so, didn't you? And--and--in short--you thought you might as well. You knew I expected it--or had expected it once--and so--so you did it. Tell me, Thor dear; am I so very far wrong? Wasn't it like that?"

He raised his head defiantly. "And if I admitted that it was like that, what then?"

"Oh, nothing. I should merely ask you the same thing--to let me go away."

"Away for how long?"

She reflected. "Till I could establish a new basis on which to come back."

"I don't know what you mean by a new basis."

"I dare say I don't mean anything very different from the compromise most people have to make--a little while after marriage; only that in my case the necessity comes more as--a shock. You see, Thor, you're not the man--not the man I thought you were. I must have a little while to get used to that."

He stirred uneasily. "You find I'm--I'm not so good a man."

"Oh, I don't say that. I don't say that at all. You're just as good.

Only you're not--" She went up to him, laying her hands on his shoulders--"Oh, you don't understand. I loved the other Thor. I'm not sure that I love this one. I don't know. Perhaps I do. I can't tell till I get away from you. Let me go. It may not be for long."

She stepped back from him toward the window of her room, through which she seemed about to pa.s.s. He was obliged to speak in order to retain her.

"Look here, Lois," he began, not knowing exactly how he meant to continue. She turned with a foot on the threshold, her hand on the k.n.o.b of the open window-door. The pose, set off by the simplicity of the old black evening dress she was in the habit of wearing when they were alone, displayed the commanding beauty of her figure to a degree which he had never observed before. He remembered afterward that something shot through him, something he had a.s.sociated hitherto only with memories of little Rosie Fay, but for the minute he was too intensely preoccupied for more than a subconscious attention. She was waiting and he must say something to justify his appeal to her. "It's all right,"