“They had reason to say it—­I never told.”

“Of course you never told, Miss Kate!” I seemed to learn a great deal of her from that.  She had carried her wound secretly through all those years.

“Poor Little Miss!” I said in spite of myself, and at this quite unexpectedly there befell what I had hoped we might both be spared.

I might not soothe her as I would have wished, so I busied myself in the next room until she called to me.  She was putting what touches she could to her eyes with a small and sadly bedraggled handkerchief.

“There is a better reason for telling no one now,” she said, “so we must destroy this.  Mother might see it.”

My grate contained its summer accumulation of waste paper.  She laid the picture on this and I lighted the pyre.

“Your mother will see your eyes,” I said.

“She has seen them so before.”  And she gave me her hand, which I kissed.

“Poor Little Miss!” I said, still holding it.

“Not poor now—­you have given me back so much.  I can believe again—­I can believe almost as much as Jim.”

But I released her hand.  Though her eyes had not quitted mine, their look was one of utter friendliness.

CHAPTER XXVII

HOW A TRUCE WAS TROUBLESOME

In the days and nights that followed this interview I associated rather more than usual with Jim.  It seemed well to do so.  I needed to learn once more some of the magnificent belief that I had taught him in days when my own was stronger.  Close companionship with a dog of the truly Greek spirit, under circumstances in which I now found myself, was bound to be of a tonic value.  I had seen, almost at the moment of Miss Kate’s disclosure, that a change was to come in our relations.  Perhaps I was wild enough at the moment to hope that it might be a change for the better; but this was only in the first flush of it—­of a moment ill adapted for close reasoning.  It took no great while to convince me that the discovery in which we had cooperated was of a character necessarily to put me from her even farther than she had at first chosen to put me—­and that was far enough, Heaven knows.

In effect I had given back her love to her, a love she had for ten years unjustly doubted.  That was the cold truth of it for one who knew women.  One who could doubt the tenth year as poignantly as she had doubted in the first—­would she not in bitterness regret her doubt ten other years, and sweetly mourn her lost love still another ten?  She who had let me be little enough to her while she felt her wound—­how much less could I be when the hurt was healed?  Before she might have been in want.  At least that was conceivable.  Now her want was met.  Not only was there this to fill her heart, but remorse, the tenderest a woman may know, it seems to me—­remorse for undeserved suspicion.

In a setting less prosaic than Little Arcady, where events might be of a story-fitness, that lover would have been alive by a happy chance, estranged by the misunderstanding but splendidly faithful, and I should have been helper and interested witness to an ideal reconciliation; thereafter to play out my game with a full heart, though with an exterior placidly unconcerned.  But with us events halt always a little short of true romance.  They are unexcitingly usual.