But he was not listening for what it might be.  He was still morosely preoccupied with his own crime.  He had been a beast!  He had bruised, once more, the white petals of a flower!

It was not that her courage failed.  She saw he wouldn’t believe.  That he couldn’t be made to believe.  It was no use.  If he looked at her any longer like that, she would laugh.

She buried her face in her arms and sobbed.

He rose to this crisis handsomely, waited without a word until she was quiet and then suggested that they go and find Rush and Sylvia.  And until they were upon the point of joining the other pair nothing more was said that had any bearing on what had happened in the apple tree.  But in that last moment he made a mute appeal for a chance to say another word.

He reminded her that she had said she would marry him if she could.  This was enough for him.  More than he deserved.  He was going back to the beginning to try to build anew what his loss of self-control had wrecked.  She need say nothing now.  If she’d wait, she’d see.

CHAPTER XIV

A CLAIRVOYANT INTERVAL

It was still May and the North Carolina mountain-side that John Wollaston looked out upon was at the height of its annual debauch of azalea blooms, a symphonic romance in the key of rose-color with modulations down to strawberry and up to a clear singing white.  For him though, the invalid, cushioned and pillowed in an easy chair, a rug over his knees, these splendors and the perfume of the soft bright air that bathed them had an ironic significance.

He had arrived with Paula at this paradise early in the week, pretty well exhausted with the ordinary fatigues of less than a day’s journey in the train.  They were feeding him bouillon, egg-nogs and cream.  On Paula’s arm he had managed this afternoon, his first walk, a matter of two or three hundred yards about the hotel gardens, and at the end of it had been glad to subside, half reclining into this easy chair, placed so that through the open door and the veranda it gave upon, he could enjoy the view of the color-drenched mountain-side.

He had dismissed Paula peremptorily for a real walk of her own.  He had told her, in simple truth, that he would enjoy being left to himself for a while.  She had taken this assurance for an altruistic mendacity, but she had yielded at last to his insistence and gone, under an exacted promise not to come back for at least an hour.

It offered some curious compensations though, this state of helplessness—­a limpidity of vision, clairvoyant almost.  For a fortnight he had been like a spectator sitting in the stalls of a darkened theatre watching the performances upon a brilliantly lighted stage, himself—­himselves among the characters, for there was a past and a future self for him to look at and ponder upon.  The present self hardly counted.  All the old ambitions, desires, urgencies, which had been his impulsive forces were gone—­quiescent anyhow.  He was as sexless, as cool, as an image carved in jade.