Tears filled his eyes, and though there was no one near him, no one to notice, he slowly lowered his head to keep them from being detected.
He stood Thus, head lowered, somewhat like a muted mourner at a bier. A bier that no one but he could see.
The ground before his unseeing eyes was blank; biscuit-colored earth basking in the sun. As blank, perhaps, as his life would be from now on.
Then without a sound of approach, the rounded shadow of a small head advanced timorously across it; cast from somewhere behind him, rising upward from below. A neck, two shoulders, followed it. Then the graceful indentation of a waist. Then the whole pattern stopped flowing, stood still.
His dulled eyes took no note of the phenomenon. They were not seeing the ground, nor anything imprinted upon it; they were seeing the St. Louis Street house. They were saying farewell to it. He'd never enter it again, he'd never go back there. He'd turn it over to an agent, and have him sell--
There was the light touch of a hand upon his shoulder. No exacting weight, no compulsive stroke; velvety and gossamer as the alighting of a butterfly. The shadow on the ground had raised a shadow-arm to another shadow--his--linking them for a moment, then dropping it again.
His head came up slowly. Then equally slowly he turned it toward the side from which the touch had come.
A figure swept around before him, as on a turntable, pivoting to claim the center of his eyes; though it was he and not the background that had shifted.
It was diminutive, and yet so perfectly proportioned within its own lesser measurements that, but for the yardstick of comparison offered when the eye deliberately sought out others and placed them against it, it could have seemed of any height at alclass="underline" of the grandeur of a classical statue or of the minuteness of an exquisite doll.
Her limpid brown eyes came up to the turn of Durand's shoulder. Her face held an exquisite beauty he had never before seen, the beauty of porcelain, but without its cold stillness, and a crumpled rose petal of a mouth.
She was no more than in her early twenties, and though her size might have lent her added youth, the illusion had very little to subtract from the reality. Her skin was that of a young girl, and her eyes were the innocent, trustful eyes of a child.
Tight-spun golden curls clung to her head like a field of daisies, rebelling all but successfully at the conventional coiffure she tried to impose upon them. They took to the ubiquitous psyche-knot at the back only with the aid of forceful pins, and at the front resisted the forehead-fringe altogether, fuming about' like topaz sea spray.
She held herself in that forward-inclination that was de rigueur, known as the "Grecian bend." Her dress was of the fashion as it then was, and had been for some years. Fitting tightly as a sheath fits a furled umbrella, it had a center panel, drawn and gathered toward the back to give the appearance of an apron or a bib superimposed upon the rest, and at the back puffed into a swollen protuberance of bows and folds, artfully sustained by a wired foundation; this was the stylish bustle, without which a woman's posterior would have appeared indecently sleek. As soon expose the insteps or--reckless thought 1--the ankles as allow the sitting-part to remain flat.
A small hat of heliotrope straw, as flat as and no bigger than a man's palm, perched atop the golden curls, roguishly trying to reach down toward one eyebrow, the left, without there being enough of it to do so and still stay atop her head.
Amethyst-splinters twinkled in the tiny holes pierced through the lobes of her miniature and completely uncovered ears, and a slender ribbon of heliotrope velvet girded her throat. A parasol of heliotrope organdy, of scarcely greater diameter than a soup plate and of the consistency of mist, hovered aloft at the end of an elongated stick, like an errant violet halo. Upon the ground to one side of her sat a small gilt birdcage, its-lower portion swathed in a flannel cloth, the dome left open to expose its flitting bright-yellow occupant.
He looked at her hand, he looked at his own shoulder, so unsure was he the touch had come from her; so unsure was he as to the reason for such a touch. Slowly his hat came off, was held at questioning height above his scalp.
The compressed mouth curved in winsome smile. "You don't know me, do you, Mr. Durand ?"
He shook his head slightly.
The smile notched a dimple; rose to her eyes. "I'm Julia, Louis. May I call you Louis?"
His hat fell from his fingers to the ground, and rolled once about, for the length of half its brim. He bent and retrieved it, but only with his arm and shoulder; his face never once quited hers, as though held to it by an unbreakable magnetic current.
"But no-- How can--?"
"Julia Russell," she insisted, still smiling.
"But no-- You can't--" he kept dismembering words.
Her brows arched. The smile expired compassionately. "It was unkind of me to do this, wasn't it?"
"But--the picture--dark hair--"
"That was my aunt's I sent instead." She shook her head in belated compunction. She lowered the parasol, closed it with a little plop. With the point of its stick she began to trace cabalistic designs in the dust. She dropped her eyes and watched what she was doing with an air of sadness. "Oh, I shouldn't have, I know that now. But at the time, it didn't seem to matter so much, we hadn't become serious yet. I thought it was just a correspondence. Then many times since, I wanted to send the right one in its place, to tell you-- And the longer I waited, the less courage I had. Fearing I'd--I'd lose you altogether in that way. It preyed on my mind more and more, and yet, the closer the time drew-- At the very last moment, I was already aboard the boat, and I wanted to turn around and go back. Bertha prevailed upon me to-to continue down here. My sister, you know."
"I know," he nodded, still dazed.
"The last thing she said to me, just before I left, was, 'He'll forgive you. He'll understand you meant no harm.' But during the entire trip down, how bitterly I repented my--my frivolity." Her head all but hung, and she caught at her mouth, gnawing at it with her small white teeth.
"I can't believe-I can't believe--" was all he could keep stammering.
She was an image of lovely penitence, tracing her parasol-stick about on the ground, shyly waiting for forgiveness.
"But so much younger--" he marveled. "So much lovelier even than--"
"That too entered into it," she murmured. "So many men become smitten with just a pretty face. I wanted our feeling to go deeper than that. To last longer. To be more secure. I wanted you to care for me, if you did care, because of--well, the things I wrote you, the sort of mind I displayed, the sort of person I really was, rather than because of a flibbertigibbet's photograph. I thought perhaps if I gave myself every possible disadvantage at the beginning, of appearance and age and so forth, then there would be that much less danger later, of its being just a passing fancy. In other words, I put the obstacles at the beginning, rather than have them at the end."
How sensible she was, he discovered to himself, how level-minded, in addition to all her external attractions. Why, there were the components here of a paragon.
"How many times I tried to write you the truth, you'll never know," she went on contritely. "And each time my courage would fail. I was afraid I would only succeed in alienating you entirely, from a person who, by her own admission, had been guilty of falsehood. I couldn't trust such a thing to cold paper" She gestured charmingly with one hand. "And now you see me, and now you know. The worst."
"The worst," he protested strenuously. "But you," he went on after a moment, still amazed, "but you, knowing all along what I did not know until now, that I was so much--well, considerably, older than you. And yet--"
She dropped her eyes, as if in additional confession. "Perhaps that may have been one of your principal attractions, who knows? I have, since as far back as I can remember, been capable of--shall I say, romantic feelings, the proper degree of emotion or admiration--only toward men older than myself. Boys of my own age have never interested me. I don't know what to attribute it to. All the women in my family have been like that. My mother was married at fifteen, and my father was at the time well over forty. The mere fact that you were thirty-six, was what first--" With maidenly seemliness, she forebore to finish it.