“You’re not sorry you did it?”
“Oh, no,” said Juliet.
Now there is not much in two such simple replies as these to indicate the state of one’s mind and heart; but when a girl has been crying stormily and uninterruptedly for a half-hour, and is only not crying still because she is holding back the torrent of her unhappiness by sheer force of will, it is radically impossible to say so much as four words in a perfectly natural way. Anthony understood in a breath that the unfamiliar note in his friend’s voice was that of tears. And, strange to say, into his face there flashed a look of triumph. But he only said very gently:
“Come here a minute—will you, Juliet?”
She bent lower over the curtain. Then she stood up, without looking at him, and moved toward the door.
“I believe I’m rather tired,” she said in a low tone. “It has been so warm all day, and I—I have a headache.”
In three steps he came after her, stopping her with his hand grasping hers as she would have left the room.
“Come back—please,” he urged. “Your aunt is asleep out there, I think. I wanted to go over the house once more with you, if you would. But you’re too tired for that. Just come back and sit down in this nook of yours, and let’s talk a little.”
She could not well refuse, and he put her into a nest of cushions, arranging them carefully behind her back and head, and sat down facing her. He had placed her just where the waning light from the western sky fell full on her face; his own was in the shadow. He was watching her unmercifully—she felt that, and desperately turned her face aside, burying in a friendly pillow the cheek which was colouring under his gaze.
“Is the headache so bad?” he asked softly. “I never knew Juliet Marcy to have a headache before. Poor little girl—dear little girl—who has worked so hard to please her old friend.” He leaned forward and she felt his hand upon her hair. The tenderness in his voice and touch were carrying away all her defences. But he went on without giving her respite.
“Do you think she will be happy here, chum? Will it take the place of the old life for a few years, till I can give her more? She’ll have nothing here, you know, outside of this little home, but my love. That wouldn’t be enough for any ordinary woman, would it?”
She was not looking at him, but she could see him as plainly as if she were. Always she had thought him the strongest, best fellow she knew. He had been her devoted friend so long; she had not realised in the least until lately how it was going to seem to get on without him. But she knew now.
She felt a dreadful choking in her throat again. It seemed to be closely connected with another peculiar sensation, as if her heart had turned into a lump of lead. In another minute she knew that she should break down, which would be humiliating beyond words. She started up from her cushions with a fierce attempt to keep a grip upon herself.
“I know you’re very happy,” she breathed, “and I’m very glad. But really I—I’m not at all sentimental to-night. I’m afraid a headache does not make one sympathetic.”
But she could not get past him; Anthony’s stalwart figure barred the way. His strong hands put her gently back among the cushions. She turned her head away, fighting hard for that thing she could not keep—her self-control.
“Is it really a headache?” asked the low voice in her ear. “Just a headache? Not by any chance—a heartache, Juliet?”
“Anthony Robeson!” she cried, but guardedly, lest the open window betray her. “What do you mean? You say very strange things. Why should I have a heartache? Because you are marrying the girl you love? How often have I begged you to go and find her? Do you think I would have done all this for her—and you—if I had cared?”
She tried to look defiantly into his eyes—those fine eyes of his which were watching her so intently—tried to meet them steadily with her own lovely, tear-stained ones—and failed. Swiftly an intense colour dyed her cheeks, and she dropped her head like a guilty child.
“Of course I care—that is, in a way,” she was somehow forced to admit before the bar of his silence. “Why shouldn’t I hate to lose the friend who used to carry my books to school, and fought the other boys for my sake, and has been a brother to me all these years? Of course I do. And when I am tired I cry for nothing—just nothing. I——”
It was certainly a brave attempt at eloquence, but perhaps it was not wonderfully convincing. At all events it did not keep Anthony from taking possession of one of her hands and interrupting her with a most irrelevant speech.
“Juliet, do you remember telling me that you should expect a man who loved you to carry your likeness always with him? And you asked me for hers—and I had to own I had left it behind. Yet I had one with me then—it is always with me—and that was why I forgot the other. Look.”
He drew out a little silver case, and Juliet, reluctantly releasing one eye from the shelter of the friendly sofa pillow, saw with a start her own face look smiling back at her. It was a little picture of her girlish self which she had given him long ago when he went away to college.
“No,” he said quickly, as he recognised the indignant question which instantly showed in her eyes, “I’m not disloyal to Eleanor Langham. Because—dear—there is no such person.”
With a little cry she flung herself away from him among the pillows, hiding her face from sight. There was a moment’s silence while Anthony Robeson, his own face growing pale with the immensity of the stakes for which he played, made his last venture.
“The little home is only for you, Juliet. If you won’t share it with me it shall be closed and sold. Perhaps it was an audacious thing to do—it has come over me a great many times that it was too audacious ever to be forgiven. But I couldn’t help the hope that if you should make the home yourself you might come to feel that life with a man who had his way to make could be borne after all—if you loved him enough. It all depended on that. As I said, I didn’t mean to be presumptuous, but it was a desperate chance with me, dear. I couldn’t give you up, and I thought perhaps—just perhaps—you cared—more than you knew. Anyhow—I loved you so—I had to risk it.”
Juliet’s charming brown head was buried so deep in the pillows that only its back with the masses of waving, half-rumpled hair was visible. But up from the depths came a smothered question:
“The photograph?”
Anthony’s face lightened as if the sun had struck it, but he kept his voice quiet. “Borrowed—it’s my old friend Dennison’s. I never even saw the girl—though I ought to beg her pardon for the use I have made of her face. She’s married now, and lives abroad somewhere. Will you forgive me?”
He was standing over her, leaning down so that his cheek touched the rumpled hair. “How is it, Juliet? Could you live in the little home—with love—and me?”
It was a long time before he got any answer. But at last a flushed, wet, radiant face came into view, an arm was reached out, and as with an inarticulate, deep note of joy he drew her up into his embrace, a voice, half tears, half laughter, cried:
“Oh, Tony—you dear, bad, darling, insolent boy! I did think I could do without you—but I can’t. And—oh, Tony”—she was sobbing in his arms now, while he regarded the top of her head with laughing, exultant eyes—“I’m so glad—so glad—so glad—there isn’t any Eleanor Langham! Oh, how I hated her!”
“Did you, sweetheart?” he answered, laughing aloud now. Then bending, with his lips close to hers—“well, to tell the truth—to tell the honest truth, little girl—so did I!”
VII.—An