Mrs. Ashmeade was looking out over the river now, but she seemed to see a great way, a very great way, beyond its glaring waters, and to be rather uncertain as to whether what she beheld there was of a humorous or pathetic nature.

“Rudolph, do you remember that evening—­the first summer that I knew you—­at Fortress Monroe, when we sat upon the pier so frightfully late, and the moon rose out of the bay, and made a great, solid-looking, silver path that led straight over the rim of the world, and you talked to me about—­about what, now?”

“Oh, yes, yes!—­I remember perfectly!  One of the most beautiful evenings I ever saw.  I remember it quite distinctly.  I talked—­I—­and what, in the Lord’s name, did I talk about, Polly?”

“Ah, men forget!  A woman never forgets when she is really friends with a man.  I know now you were telling me about Anne Charteris, for you have been in love with her all your life, Rudolph, in your own particular half-hearted and dawdling fashion.  Perhaps that is why you have had so many affairs.  You plainly found the run of women so unimportant that it put every woman on her pride to prove she was different.  Yes, I remember.  But that night I thought you were trying to make love to me, and I was disappointed in you, and—­yes, rather pleased.  Women are all vain and perfectly inconsistent.  But then, girl-children always take after their fathers.”

Mrs. Ashmeade rose from her chair.  Her fan shut with a snap.

“You were a dear boy, Rudolph, when I first knew you—­and what I liked was that you never made love to me.  Of all the boys I have known and helped to form, you were the only sensible one—­the only one who never presumed.  That was rather clever of you, Rudolph.  It would have been ridiculous, for even arithmetically I am older than you.

“Wouldn’t it have been ridiculous, Rudolph?” she demanded, suddenly.

“Not in the least,” Musgrave protested, in courteous wise.  “You—­why, Polly, you were a wonderfully handsome woman.  Any boy——­”

“Oh, yes!—­I was.  I’m not now, am I, Rudolph?” Mrs. Ashmeade threw back her head and laughed naturally.  “Ah, dear boy that was, it is unfair, isn’t it, for an old woman to seize upon you in this fashion, and insist on your making love to her?  But I will let you off.  You don’t have to do it.”

She caught her skirts in her left hand, preparatory to going, and her right hand rested lightly on his arm.  She spoke in a rather peculiar voice.

“Yes,” she said, “the boy was a very, very dear boy, and I want the man to be equally brave and—­sensible.”

Musgrave stared after her.  “I wonder—­I wonder—?  Oh, no, that couldn’t be,” he said, and wearily.

“There must be some preposterous situations that don’t come about.”

* * * * *

And afterward he strolled across the lawn, where the locusts were shrilling, as if in a stubborn prediction of something which was inevitable, and he meditated upon a great number of things.  There were a host of fleecy little clouds in the sky.  He looked up at them, interrogatively.