One morning, when he had been settled in his wheeled chair, she brought out the story of the Jester’s Sword, saying, tremulously, “Will you do something for me?  Jack?  Read this little book yourself.  I know you don’t halfway listen to what I read any more, and I don’t blame you, but this seems to have been written just on purpose for you.”

He took the book from her listlessly, and opened it because she wished it.  Watching him from the doorway, she waited until she saw him glance up from the opening paragraph to the watch-fob lying on the stand at his elbow.  Then he looked back at the page, with a slight show of interest, and she knew that the reference to Mars’ month and the bloodstone had caught his attention as it had hers.  Then she left him alone with it, hoping fervently it would arouse in him at least a tithe of the interest it had awakened in her.

When she came back after awhile he merely handed her the book, saying in an indifferent way, “A very pretty little tale, Mary,” and leaned back in his chair with closed eyes, as if dismissing it from his thoughts.  She was disappointed, but later she saw him sitting with it in his hand again, closed over one finger as if to keep the place, while he looked out of the window with a faraway expression in his eyes.  Later the nurse asked her what book it was he kept under his pillow.  He drew it out occasionally, she said, and glanced at one of the pages as if he were trying to memorize it.

That he had at last read it as she read it, putting himself in the place of Aldebaran, Mary knew one day from an unconscious reference he made to it.  A sudden wind had blown up, scattering papers and magazines across the room, and fluttering his curtains like flags.  She ran in to pick up the wind-blown articles and close the shutters.  When everything was in order, as she thought, she turned to go out, but he stopped her, saying almost fretfully, “You haven’t picked up that picture that blew down.”  When she glanced all around the room, unable to discover it, he pointed to the hearth.  A photograph had fallen from the mantel, face downward.

“There! Vesta’s picture!”

Mary picked it up and turned it over, exclaiming, “Why, no, it is Betty’s!”

“That’s what I said,” he answered, wholly unconscious of his slip of the tongue that had betrayed his secret.  Her back was turned towards him, so that he could not see the tears which sprang to her eyes.  If already it had come to this, that Betty was the Vesta of his dreams, then his renunciation must be an hundredfold harder than she had imagined.

With a pity so deep that she could not trust herself to speak, she busied herself in blowing some specks of dust from the mantel, as an excuse to keep her back turned.  She was relieved when the nurse came in with a glass of lemonade and she could slip out without his seeing her face.  She sat down on the back steps, her arms around her knees to think about the discovery she had just made.  It made her heart-sick because it added so immeasurably to the weight of Jack’s misfortune.