His cigar was finished, yet the girl had not once moved. Abruptly, as before, he spoke to her, as he moved to leave.
"What are you looking at?" he demanded. "Oh, I'm not trying to be impertinent—I would like to know what you see worth while? You have not moved for half an hour. I wish you could show me something worth that."
Again she turned and considered him with grave attention. His tired young face bore the scrutiny; she answered him.
"I am seeing all the things I have not got."
"Over there?"
She yielded his lack of imagination.
"Well, yes; over there. Don't you know it is always Faeryland—the place over there?"
"It is only Jersey—?"
She corrected him.
"The place out of reach. The place between which and ourselves flows a river, or rises a cliff. One can imagine anything to be there. See that grim, unreal castle, there in the shadows, its windows all gleaming with light from within. Well, it is a factory where they make soap-powder, but from here I can see Fair Rosamond leaning from its arched windows, if I choose, or armored and plumed knights riding into its gates."
"Oh!" Disappointment made the exclamation listless. "Story-making, you were? I am afraid I can't see that way, thank you; I haven't the head for it."
For the first time she smiled, with a warm lighting of her rain-gray eyes and a Madonna-like protectiveness of expression. He felt as distinct an impression as if she had laid her hand on his arm with an actual touch of sympathy.
"But I do not see that way, either," she explained. "That was an illustration. I mean that one can make pictures there of all the real things that are not real for one's self; at least, not yet real. It is a game to play, I suppose, while one waits."
"I do not understand."
She made a gesture of resignation, and was mute. He comprehended that confidence would go no farther.
"Thank you," he accepted the rebuke. "It was good of you to put up with my curiosity and—not to misunderstand my speaking."
"Oh, no! I hate to misunderstand, ever; it is so stupid."
Although he had risen, he did not go at once. The evening colors faded, first from river, then from sky. With autumn's suddenness, dusk swept down. Playing children, groups of young people and promenaders passed by the little pavilion in a gay current; automobiles multiplied with the homing hour of the city. New York thought of dining, simply or superbly, as might be.
The silent tête-à-tête in the pavilion was broken by the softest sound in the world—a baby's drowsy, gurgling chuckle of awakening. Instantly the girl in black started from revery, and then the man first noticed that a white-and-gold baby carriage stood at her end of the curved seat. Astonished, incredulous, he saw her throw back miniature coverlets of frost-white eiderdown and bend over the little face, pink as a hollyhock, nestled there. For the first time in his life he witnessed the pretty byplay of the nursery—dropped kisses, the answering pats of chubby, useless hands, love-words and replying baby speech, inarticulate, adorable.
The scene struck deeply into inner places of thought he had never known lay at the back of consciousness. He never had thought very profoundly, until the last few weeks. And even yet he was struggling, turning in a mental circle of doubt, rather than thinking. The girl and the child flung open a door through which he glimpsed strange vistas, startling in their forbidden possibilities. He stood watching, dumb, until she turned to him. Her face was kindled and laughing; she looked infinitely candid and good. But—she looked maid, not mother. Somehow he felt that.
"You are married?" he questioned, almost roughly. "I did not suppose—— You are married, then?"
Into her expression swept scorn for his dulness, compassion for his ignorance, fused by the flaring fire of some intense feeling far beyond his ken.
"Married? No. Or I would not be here!"
"Why? Where would you be?"
The baby was standing upright in its coach. The girl passed an arm about the tottering form to steady the fat little feet, and retorted on her questioner.
"Where? Home, of course, making ready for my man! If I lived there,"—with a gesture toward the tall, luxurious apartment houses on the Drive, behind them, "I would be choosing my prettiest frock and coiling my hair the way he liked best. If I lived there, across the river in one of those little houses, I would be making the house bright with lamps; wearing my whitest apron and making the supper hot—very hot, for there is frost in the air and he would be cold and tired and hungry. And I would have his chair ready and draw the curtains because he was inside and no one else mattered." She paused, drawing a deep breath. "That is where I would be," she concluded, as one patiently lessoning a dull pupil, and reseated the baby in its coach in obvious preparation for departure.
The man had stood quite still, dazed. But when she turned away, with a bend of her dark little head by way of farewell, he roused himself and overtook her in a stride.
"Thank you," he said, "I mean for letting me know anyone could feel like that. I suppose a great many people do, only I have not met that kind? No, never mind answering; how should you know? But, thank you. May I—if I see you again—may I speak to you?"
She surveyed him gravely, as if with clairvoyant ability to read a history from his face, a face open-browed and planned for strength, by its square outlines, but that somehow only succeeded in being pleasant and passively agreeable. It was the face of a man who never had been brought against conflict or any need for stern decision, whose true character was a sword never yet drawn from the sheath. And now, he was in trouble; so much lay plain to see. He was in bitter trouble and, she guessed, alone with the trouble.
He stood in mute acceptance of her scrutiny, recognizing her right, since he had asked so much. Before she spoke, he knew her answer, seeing it foreshadowed in the gray eyes.
"If you wish to very much. But—not too soon again."
She stepped from the curb, allowing no reply, but without apparent haste, pushing the carriage in which the baby chuckled and twisted to peep back at her. He watched her thread her way through the rushing lines of pleasure traffic; saw her reach the other side and disappear behind a knoll clothed with turf and evergreens that rose between them. The woman from whose presence he had come to this chance encounter once had told him that any human being looked absurd propelling a baby-coach. He recalled that statement now, and did not find it true. It was such a sane thing to do, so natural and good. At least, it seemed so when this girl did it. He envied the man, whoever he might be, who did, or would love her; envied him the clean simplicity she would make of life and the absence of hateful complications.
People were glancing curiously at his motionless figure; he aroused himself and walked on. He had chosen his own way of living, he angrily told himself; there was no excuse for whining if he did not like the place where free-will had led him. Yet—had he? Or had he, instead, been trapped? The doubt was ugly. He walked faster to escape it, but it ran at his heels like one of those sinister demon-animals of medieval legend.
Across the blackening river electric signs were flashing into view; gigantic affairs insolently shouldering themselves into the unwilling attention, as indeed they were designed to do by Jersey's desire for the greater city's patronage. Looking toward one of these, the man read it with a sullen distaste: "Adriance's Paper." That simple announcement marked an industry, even a monopoly, great enough to have been subjected more than once to the futile investigations of an uneasy government.
The family name was sufficiently unusual, the family fortune sufficiently well known to have been bracketted together for him