Chapter THE SIXTH: Lady Mary Justin (3)

"How do I know that she's not being told some story of my abandonment of her? How do I know she isn't being led to believe I no longer want her to come to me?"

"She isn't," said Tarvrille, still with that arrested judicial note in his voice. "You had her letters?" he said.

"Two."

"Yes. Didn't they speak?"

"I want to see her. Damn it, Tarvrille!" I cried with sudden tears in my smarting eyes. "Let _her_ send me away. This isn't---- Not treating us like human beings."

"Women," said Tarvrille and looked at his boot toes, "are different from men. You see, Stratton----"

He paused. "You always strike me, Stratton, as not realizing that women are weak things. We've got to take _care_ of them. You don't seem to feel that as I do. Their moods--fluctuate--more than ours do. If you hold 'em to what they say in the same way you hold a man--it isn't fair...."

He halted as though he awaited my assent to that proposition.

"If you were to meet Mary now, you see, and if you were to say to her, come--come and we'll jump down Etna together, and you said it in the proper voice and with the proper force, she'd do it, Stratton. You know that. Any man knows a thing like that. And she wouldn't _want_ to do it...."

"You mean that's why I can't see her."

"That's why you can't see her."

"Because we'd become--dramatic."

"Because you'd become--romantic and uncivilized."

"Well," I said sullenly, realizing the bargain we were making, "I won't."

"You won't make any appeal?"

"No."

He made no answer, and I looked up to discover him glancing over his shoulder through the great glass window into the other room. I stood up very quickly, and there in the further apartment were Guy and Mary, standing side by side. Our eyes met, and she came forward towards the window impulsively, and paused, with that unpitying pane between us....

Then Guy was opening the door for her and she stood in the doorway. She was in dark furs wrapped about her, but in the instant I could see how ill she was and how broken. She came a step or so towards me and then stopped short, and so we stood, shyly and awkwardly under Guy and Tarvrille's eyes, two yards apart. "You see," she said, and stopped lamely.

"You and I," I said, "have to part, Mary. We---- We are beaten. Is that so?"

"Stephen, there is nothing for us to do. We've offended. We broke the rules. We have to pay."

"By parting?"

"What else is there to do?"

"No," I said. "There's nothing else." ...

"I tried," she said, "that you shouldn't be sent from England."

"That's a detail," I answered.

"But your politics--your work?"

"That does not matter. The great thing is that you are ill and unhappy--that I can't help you. I can't do anything.... I'd go anywhere ... to save you.... All I can do, I suppose, is to part like this and go."

"I shan't be--altogether unhappy. And I shall think of you----"

She paused, and we stood facing one another, tongue-tied. There was only one word more to say, and neither of us would say it for a moment.

"Good-bye," she whispered at last, and then, "Don't think I deserted you, Stephen my dear. Don't think ill of me. I couldn't come--I couldn't come to you," and suddenly her face changed slowly and she began to weep, my fearless playmate whom I had never seen weeping before; she began to weep as an unhappy child might weep.

"Oh my Mary!" I cried, weeping also, and held out my arms, and we clung together and kissed with tear-wet faces.

"No," cried Guy belatedly, "we promised Justin!"

But Tarvrille restrained his forbidding arm, and then after a second's interval put a hand on my shoulder. "Come," he said....

And so it was Mary and I parted from one another.