IV

On a damp afternoon in September of the following year a young man with

his face burned to a deep copper glow got off a train at a city in

Tennessee. He looked around anxiously, and seemed relieved when he found

that there was no one in the station to meet him. He taxied to the best

hotel in the city where he registered with some satisfaction as George

O'Kelly, Cuzco, Peru.

Up in his room he sat for a few minutes at the window looking down into

the familiar street below. Then with his hand trembling faintly he took

off the telephone receiver and called a number.

"Is Miss Jonquil in?"

"This is she."

"Oh--" His voice after overcoming a faint tendency to waver went on with

friendly formality.

"This is George Rollins. Did you get my letter?"

"Yes. I thought you'd be in to-day."

Her voice, cool and unmoved, disturbed him, but not as he had expected.

This was the voice of a stranger, unexcited, pleasantly glad to see

him--that was all. He wanted to put down the telephone and catch his

breath.

"I haven't seen you for--a long time." He succeeded in making this sound

offhand. "Over a year."

He knew how long it had been--to the day.

"It'll be awfully nice to talk to you again."

"I'll be there in about an hour."

He hung up. For four long seasons every minute of his leisure had been

crowded with anticipation of this hour, and now this hour was here. He

had thought of finding her married, engaged, in love--he had not thought

she would be unstirred at his return.

There would never again in his life, he felt, be another ten months like

these he had just gone through. He had made an admittedly remarkable

showing for a young engineer--stumbled into two unusual opportunities,

one in Peru, whence he had just returned, and another, consequent upon

it, in New York, whither he was bound. In this short time he had risen

from poverty into a position of unlimited opportunity.

He looked at himself in the dressing-table mirror. He was almost black

with tan, but it was a romantic black, and in the last week, since he

had had time to think about it, it had given him considerable pleasure.

The hardiness of his frame, too, he appraised with a sort of

fascination. He had lost part of an eyebrow somewhere, and he still wore

an elastic bandage on his knee, but he was too young not to realize that

on the steamer many women had looked at him with unusual tributary

interest.

His clothes, of course, were frightful. They had been made for him by a

Greek tailor in Lima--in two days. He was young enough, too, to have

explained this sartorial deficiency to Jonquil in his otherwise laconic

note. The only further detail it contained was a request that he should

_not_ be met at the station.

George O'Kelly, of Cuzco, Peru, waited an hour and a half in the hotel,

until, to be exact, the sun had reached a midway position in the sky.

Then, freshly shaven and talcum-powdered toward a somewhat more

Caucasian hue, for vanity at the last minute had overcome romance, he

engaged a taxicab and set out for the house he knew so well.

He was breathing hard--he noticed this but he told himself that it was

excitement, not emotion. He was here; she was not married--that was

enough. He was not even sure what he had to say to her. But this was the

moment of his life that he felt he could least easily have dispensed

with. There was no triumph, after all, without a girl concerned, and if

he did not lay his spoils at her feet he could at least hold them for a

passing moment before her eyes.

The house loomed up suddenly beside him, and his first thought was that

it had assumed a strange unreality. There was nothing changed--only

everything was changed. It was smaller and it seemed shabbier than

before--there was no cloud of magic hovering over its roof and issuing

from the windows of the upper floor. He rang the door-bell and an

unfamiliar colored maid appeared. Miss Jonquil would be down in a

moment. He wet his lips nervously and walked into the sitting-room--and

the feeling of unreality increased. After all, he saw, this was only a

room, and not the enchanted chamber where he had passed those poignant

hours. He sat in a chair, amazed to find it a chair, realizing that his

imagination had distorted and colored all these simple familiar things.

Then the door opened and Jonquil came into the room--and it was as

though everything in it suddenly blurred before his eyes. He had not

remembered how beautiful she was, and he felt his face grow pale and his

voice diminish to a poor sigh in his throat.

She was dressed in pale green, and a gold ribbon bound back her dark,

straight hair like a crown. The familiar velvet eyes caught his as she

came through the door, and a spasm of fright went through him at her

beauty's power of inflicting pain.

He said "Hello," and they each took a few steps forward and shook hands.

Then they sat in chairs quite far apart and gazed at each other across

the room.

"You've come back," she said, and he answered just as tritely: "I wanted

to stop in and see you as I came through."

He tried to neutralize the tremor in his voice by looking anywhere but

at her face. The obligation to speak was on him, but, unless he

immediately began to boast, it seemed that there was nothing to say.

There had never been anything casual in their previous relations--it

didn't seem possible that people in this position would talk about the

weather.

"This is ridiculous," he broke out in sudden embarrassment. "I don't

know exactly what to do. Does my being here bother you?"

"No." The answer was both reticent and impersonally sad. It depressed

him.

"Are you engaged?" he demanded.

"No."

"Are you in love with some one?"

She shook her head.

"Oh." He leaned back in his chair. Another subject seemed exhausted--the

interview was not taking the course he had intended.

"Jonquil," he began, this time on a softer key, "after all that's

happened between us, I wanted to come back and see you. Whatever I do in

the future I'll never love another girl as I've loved you."

This was one of the speeches he had rehearsed. On the steamer it had

seemed to have just the right note--a reference to the tenderness he

would always feel for her combined with a non-committal attitude toward

his present state of mind. Here with the past around him, beside him,

growing minute by minute more heavy on the air, it seemed theatrical and

stale.

She made no comment, sat without moving, her eyes fixed on him with an

expression that might have meant everything or nothing.

"You don't love me any more, do you?" he asked her in a level voice.

"No."

When Mrs. Cary came in a minute later, and spoke to him about his

success--there had been a half-column about him in the local paper--he

was a mixture of emotions. He knew now that he still wanted this girl,

and he knew that the past sometimes comes back--that was all. For the

rest he must be strong and watchful and he would see.

"And now," Mrs. Cary was saying, "I want you two to go and see the lady

who has the chrysanthemums. She particularly told me she wanted to see

you because she'd read about you in the paper."

They went to see the lady with the chrysanthemums. They walked along the

street, and he recognized with a sort of excitement just how her shorter

footsteps always fell in between his own. The lady turned out to be

nice, and the chrysanthemums were enormous and extraordinarily

beautiful. The lady's gardens were full of them, white and pink and

yellow, so that to be among them was a trip back into the heart of

summer. There were two gardens full, and a gate between them; when they

strolled toward the second garden the lady went first through the gate.

And then a curious thing happened. George stepped aside to let Jonquil

pass, but instead of going through she stood still and stared at him for

a minute. It was not so much the look, which was not a smile, as it was

the moment of silence. They saw each other's eyes, and both took a

short, faintly accelerated breath, and then they went on into the second

garden. That was all.

The afternoon waned. They thanked the lady and walked home slowly,

thoughtfully, side by side. Through dinner too they were silent. George

told Mr. Cary something of what had happened in South America, and

managed to let it be known that everything would be plain sailing for

him in the future.

Then dinner was over, and he and Jonquil were alone in the room which

had seen the beginning of their love affair and the end. It seemed to

him long ago and inexpressibly sad. On that sofa he had felt agony and

grief such as he would never feel again. He would never be so weak or so

tired and miserable and poor. Yet he knew that that boy of fifteen

months before had had something, a trust, a warmth that was gone

forever. The sensible thing--they had done the sensible thing. He had

traded his first youth for strength and carved success out of despair.

But with his youth, life had carried away the freshness of his love.

"You won't marry me, will you?" he said quietly.

Jonquil shook her dark head.

"I'm never going to marry," she answered.

He nodded.

"I'm going on to Washington in the morning," he said.

"Oh----"

"I have to go. I've got to be in New York by the first, and meanwhile I

want to stop off in Washington."

"Business!"

"No-o," he said as if reluctantly. "There's some one there I must see

who was very kind to me when I was so--down and out."

This was invented. There was no one in Washington for him to see--but he

was watching Jonquil narrowly, and he was sure that she winced a little,

that her eyes closed and then opened wide again.

"But before I go I want to tell you the things that happened to me since

I saw you, and, as maybe we won't meet again, I wonder if--if just this

once you'd sit in my lap like you used to. I wouldn't ask except since

there's no one else--yet--perhaps it doesn't matter."

She nodded, and in a moment was sitting in his lap as she had sat so

often in that vanished spring. The feel of her head against his

shoulder, of her familiar body, sent a shock of emotion over him. His

arms holding her had a tendency to tighten around her, so he leaned back

and began to talk thoughtfully into the air.

He told her of a despairing two weeks in New York which had terminated

with an attractive if not very profitable job in a construction plant in

Jersey City. When the Peru business had first presented itself it had

not seemed an extraordinary opportunity. He was to be third assistant

engineer on the expedition, but only ten of the American party,

including eight rodmen and surveyors, had ever reached Cuzco. Ten days

later the chief of the expedition was dead of yellow fever. That had

been his chance, a chance for anybody but a fool, a marvellous

chance----

"A chance for anybody but a fool?" she interrupted innocently.

"Even for a fool," he continued. "It was wonderful. Well, I wired New

York----"

"And so," she interrupted again, "they wired that you ought to take a

chance?"

"Ought to!" he exclaimed, still leaning back. "That I _had_ to. There

was no time to lose----"

"Not a minute?"

"Not a minute."

"Not even time for--" she paused.

"For what?"

"Look."

He bent his head forward suddenly, and she drew herself to him in the

same moment, her lips half open like a flower.

"Yes," he whispered into her lips. "There's all the time in the

world...."

All the time in the world--his life and hers. But for an instant as he

kissed her he knew that though he search through eternity he could never

recapture those lost April hours. He might press her close now till the

muscles knotted on his arms--she was something desirable and rare that

he had fought for and made his own--but never again an intangible

whisper in the dusk, or on the breeze of night....

Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are

all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.