I rode with Lucy the next afternoon, for the last time as we both
thought. As we came home through Lover's Lane, the ponies walking very
slowly, she leaned toward me a little, turned the great praying eyes
upon me, and said, her mouth smiling falteringly:
"Please don't go away. I hate it. Everything's gone all wrong with
the world. And if you're not my friend that I can talk to and tell
things to, I haven't one."
"Are you serious, Lucy?"
"Oh, it's no matter!" she said lightly, and began to gather her reins,
preparatory to a gallop.
"It's only that it didn't seem possible that you could need one
particular friend out of so many. Of course, I stay. Will you tell me
now what it is that's gone all wrong?"
"Yes," she said with a quickly drawn breath. "I've had to tell John
that I don't love him any more, and don't want to be his wife."
If one of those still and stately pines which lend Lover's Lane the
appearance of a cathedral aisle had fallen across my shoulders, I could
hardly have been more suddenly stunned.
When I looked at her the corners of her lovely mouth were down like
those of a child in trouble.
"Please don't look at me," she said.
We rode on very slowly in silence. Sometimes, without looking, I could
not be sure that she was still crying. Then I would hear a little
pathetic sniffling--a catching of the breath. Or she would fall to
pounding the thigh with her fist.
But she pulled herself together very quickly and borrowed my
handkerchief and when we reached the telegraph office her own husband
could not have known that she had been crying.
She held my pony while I telegraphed Gerald Colebridge that I could not
go to California with him.
Far from looking like one who had recently been crying, she looked a
triumphant little creature, as she sat the one pony, and held the
other. The color had all come back to her face, and she looked--why,
she looked happy!