At the door of the blue-and-white room, the one upon which the girl had
lavished her most tender fancies, she stood at length, looking in. And as
she looked something swam before her eyes. A sob rose in her throat. She
choked it back; she brushed her hand across her face. Then she tried to
laugh. "Oh, what a goose I am!" she said sternly to herself. And then she
ran across the room, sank upon her knees before the window-seat with its
blue and white cushions, and burying her face in one of them cried her
wretched, jealous, longing heart out.
Anthony, coming in hastily but softly through the small kitchen, heard the
rush of footsteps overhead, and stopped. He waited a moment, listening
eagerly; then he came noiselessly into the living-room and stood still.
His face, always strong and somewhat stern in its repose, had in it
to-night a certain unusual intensity. He looked at his watch and saw that
there was an hour before train time. Then he sat down where he could see
the top of the staircase and waited.
By and by light footsteps crossed the floor above and came through the
little hall. From where he sat Anthony caught the gleam of Juliet's crisp
linen skirt. Presently she came slowly down. As she turned upon the
landing she met Anthony's eyes looking up. In a fashion quite unusual to
the straightforward gaze of his friend her eyes fell. He saw that her
cheeks were pale. He rose to meet her.
"Come and rest," he said. "You are tired. You have worked too hard. Such a
helper a man never had before. And you have made a wonderful success.
Juliet, I can't thank you. It's beyond that."
But she would not be led to the cosy corner by the window. She found
something needing her attention in the curtain of the bookcase in the
dimmest corner of the room, and began solicitously to pull it in various
ways, as if there were something wrong with it. He watched her, standing
with his arm on the high chimney-piece.
"I think you enjoyed it just a little bit yourself, though," he observed.
"Didn't you, chum?"
"Yes, indeed," said Juliet.
Her back was toward him, her head bent down, but his quick ear detected a
peculiar quality in her voice. He questioned her again hurriedly.
"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_!"