Dosia shook her head. “No; only that he is very much worried over them.”

“He wanted to sell the island; he sent me off on that business lately.

He’ll sell it some time, of course, but I don’t know how complicating

the delay is. He’s the kind of man you can’t ask; you have to wait until

he tells you. You can’t _make_ a person have confidence in you. Won’t

you please have some of these strawberries with me? Do!”

“No; you must eat them _all_,” said Dosia, with charming authority, her

arms before her on the table, elbow-sleeved, white and dimpled, as she

regarded him. He seemed to take up all the corner, against the

background of the green honeysuckle in the fresh morning light. With

that smile upon his face, he seemed extraordinarily masculine and

absorbing, yet appealing, too, inviting of confidence.

Dosia felt carried out of herself by a sudden heady resolution—or,

rather, not a new resolution, but one that she had had in mind for a

long, long time, before, oh, before she had even known who this man was.

She had planned over and over again how she was to say those words, and

now the time had come. She could not sit here with him in this new,

sweet friendliness without saying them. She had imagined the scene in so

many different ways! When she had gone over it by herself, her cheeks

had flushed, her eyes had shone with the tears in them; the words as she

spoke them had gone deeply, convincingly, from heart to heart—or

perhaps, in an assumed, tremulous lightness, the meaning in her impulse

had shown all the clearer to one who understood. For a year and a half

the uttered thought had been the climax to which her dreams had led; it

would have seemed a monstrous, impossible thing that it had not been

reached before.

She began now in a moment’s pause, only to find, too late, that all

warmth and naturalness had left her with the effort. Fluent

dream-practice is only too apt to make one uncomfortably crude and

conscious in real life.

“I want to thank you for being so kind to me the night of that accident

on the train coming up from the South.” Poor Dosia instantly felt

committed to a mistake. Her eyes fell for a moment on his hand, as it

lay upon the table, with a terribly disconcerting remembrance that hers

had not only rested in it, but that in fancy she had more than once

pillowed her cheek upon it, and knew that he had seen the look; she

continued in desperation, with still increasing stiffness and formality:

“I have always known, of course, that it was you. You must pardon me for

not thanking you before.”

The old unapproachable manner instantly incased him as if in remembrance

of something that hurt. “Oh, pray don’t mention it,” he said, with a

formality that matched hers. “It was nothing but what anyone would have

done—little enough, anyway.”

What happened afterwards she did not know, except that in a few minutes

he had gone.

She watched him go off down the path with that swift, long, easy step;

watched till the last vestige of the gray suit was out of sight—he had

a fashion of wearing gray!—before clearing off the table. Then she went

and sat on the back steps that led into the little garden, bright with

the sunshine and a blaze of tulips at her feet. Justin was fond of

flowers.

Much has been written about the power of the mind to reproduce minute

details of a scene that has served as the setting for some great

emotion; the pattern of a table-cover or a rug, the flowers in a vase,

the titles of the books, the strain of music being played in the next

room—all stand out, separate and distinct, indelibly imprinted upon the

memory. There is another variety of the same phenomena, seldom commented

on, where an entirely unreal impression of the scene as a whole is left

on the mind by one or two details. To Dosia, sitting there by the little

plot of tulips, the sun was the brilliant sun of July, and those scarlet

tulips a garden wide and far-reaching, an endless vista of flowers, the

blue sky an endless vault above her—high noon and midsummer, with that

sweet-scented warmth at the busy heart of things, a circle of infinite

life humming in the low grasses, in the almost windless, hardly stirring

air. Warmth and color and life, at high noon, listening close to the

heart of things.

And Dosia! She had never supposed that any girl could care for a man

until he had shown that he cared for her—it was the unmaidenly,

impossible thing. And now—how beautiful he was, how dear! A wistful

smile trembled around her lips. All that had gone before with other men

suddenly became as nothing, forgotten and out of mind, and she herself

made clean by this purifying fire. Even if she never had anything more

in her whole life, she had this—even if she never had anything more.

Yet what had she? Nothing and less than nothing. If he had ever thought

of her, if he had ever dreamed of her, if her soft, frightened hand

trustfully clinging fast to his, only to be comforted by his touch, had

been a sign and a symbol to him of some dearer trust and faith for him

alone—if in some way, as she dimly visioned it, the thought had once

been his, it had gone long ago. Every action showed it. And yet, and

yet—so unconquerably does the soul speak that, though he might deny her

attraction for him, she knew that she had it. It was something to which

he might never give way, but it was unalterably there—as it was

unalterably there with her. All that year at home, when she believed she

had not been thinking of him, she really had been thinking of him. We

learn to know each other sometimes in long absences. She began to

perceive in him now a humility and a pride strangely at variance with

each other, and both equally at variance with the bright assurance of

his outer manner. He gave to everyone; he would work early and late for

others, in his yearning sympathy and affection: yet he himself, from the

very intenseness of his desire for it, stood aloof, and drew back from

the insistence of any claim for himself. They might meet a hundred times

and grow no closer; they might grow farther and farther away.

Dosia felt that other women must have loved him—how could they have

helped it? She had a pang of sorrow for them—for herself it made no

difference. If she had pain for all her life afterwards, she was glad at

this moment that he was worthy to be loved; she need never be ashamed of

loving him—he was “good.” The word seemed to contain some beautiful

comfort and uplifting. No matter what experience he had passed through

in his struggle with the world, he had held some simple, honorable,

_clean_ quality intact. The Dosia who must always have some heart-warm

dream to live by had it now; for all her life she could love him, pray

for him. She had always thought that to love was to be happy; now she

was to love and be unhappy—yet she would not have it otherwise.

So slight, so young, so lightly dealt with, Dosia had the pathetically

clear insight and the power that comes to those who see, not themselves

alone, their own desires and hopes, but the universe in which they

stand, and view their acts and thoughts in relation to it. She must see

Truth, “and be glad, even if it hurt.”

The sunshine fell upon her in the garden; she was bathed in it. Whether

she had nights of straining, bitter wakefulness and days of heartache

afterwards, this joy of loving was enough for her to-day—the joy of

loving him. She saw, in that lovely, brooding thought of him, what that

first meeting had taught of his character, and molded in with it her

knowledge of him now, to make the real man far more imperfect, though

far dearer. Yet, if he ever loved her as she loved him, part of that for

which she had always sought love would have to be foregone—she could

never come to him, as she had fondly dreamed of doing, and pour out to

him all those hopes and fears, those struggles and mistakes and trials

and indignities, the shame and the penitence that had been hers. She

could never talk of Lawson—her past must be forever unshriven and

uncomforted. Bailey Girard would be the last man on earth to whom she

could bare her heart in confession; these were the things that touched

him on the raw. He “hated the sound of Lawson’s name.” How many times

had George Sutton’s face blotted out hers? If he knew _that_! She must

forever be unshriven. There would be things also, perhaps, that _she_

could not bear to hear! The eternal hurt of love, that it never can be

truly one with the beloved, touched her with its sadness, and then

slipped away in the thought of him now—not just the man who was to help

and protect her with his love, but the man whom she longed to help also.

His pleased eyes, his lips, the way his hair fell over his forehead——

She thought of him with the fond dream-passion of the maiden, that is

often the shyest thing on earth, ready to veil itself and turn and elude

and hide at the first chance that it may be revealed.

“Dosia! Dosia, where are you?”

Suddenly she saw that the sunshine had faded out, the sky had grown

gray, a chill wind had sprung up. All the trouble, all the stress of the

world, seemed to encompass her with that tone in the voice of Lois.