In another moment Van Degen would be gone.  Worse yet, while he wavered in the doorway the Shallums and Chelles, after vainly awaiting her, might dash back from the Bois and break in on them.  These and other chances rose before her, urging her to action; but she held fast, immovable, unwavering, a proud yet plaintive image of renunciation.

Van Degen’s hand was on the door.  He half-opened it and then turned back.

“That’s all you’ve got to say, then?”

“That’s all.”

He jerked the door open and passed out.  She saw him stop in the ante-room to pick up his hat and stick, his heavy figure silhouetted against the glare of the wall-lights.  A ray of the same light fell on her where she stood in the unlit sitting-room, and her reflection bloomed out like a flower from the mirror that faced her.  She looked at the image and waited.  Van Degen put his hat on his head and slowly opened the door into the outer hall.  Then he turned abruptly, his bulk eclipsing her reflection as he plunged back into the room and came up to her.

“I’ll do anything you say.  Undine; I’ll do anything in God’s world to keep you!”

She turned her eyes from the mirror and let them rest on his face, which looked as small and withered as an old man’s, with a lower lip that trembled queerly....

XXI

The spring in New York proceeded through more than its usual extremes of temperature to the threshold of a sultry June.

Ralph Marvell, wearily bent to his task, felt the fantastic humours of the weather as only one more incoherence in the general chaos of his case.  It was strange enough, after four years of marriage, to find himself again in his old brown room in Washington Square.  It was hardly there that he had expected Pegasus to land him; and, like a man returning to the scenes of his childhood, he found everything on a much smaller scale than he had imagined.  Had the Dagonet boundaries really narrowed, or had the breach in the walls of his own life let in a wider vision?

Certainly there had come to be other differences between his present and his former self than that embodied in the presence of his little boy in the next room.  Paul, in fact, was now the chief link between Ralph and his past.  Concerning his son he still felt and thought, in a general way, in the terms of the Dagonet tradition; he still wanted to implant in Paul some of the reserves and discriminations which divided that tradition from the new spirit of limitless concession.  But for himself it was different.  Since his transaction with Moffatt he had had the sense of living under a new dispensation.  He was not sure that it was any worse than the other; but then he was no longer very sure about anything.  Perhaps this growing indifference was merely the reaction from a long nervous strain:  that his mother and sister thought it so was shown by the way in which they mutely watched and hovered.  Their discretion was like the hushed tread about a sick-bed.  They permitted themselves no criticism of Undine; he was asked no awkward questions, subjected to no ill-timed sympathy.  They simply took him back, on his own terms, into the life he had left them to; and their silence had none of those subtle implications of disapproval which may be so much more wounding than speech.