They were in the music room, Paula at the piano, her face turned up to Graham who stood close to her, almost over her.
“You must decide,” Graham continued.
Neither face showed happiness in the great thing that had come upon them, now that they considered what they must do.
“But I don’t want you to go,” Paula urged. “I don’t know what I want. You must bear with me. I am not considering myself. I am past considering myself. But I must consider Dick. I must consider you. I... I am so unused to such a situation,” she concluded with a wan1 smile.
“But it must be settled, dear love. Dick is not blind.”
“What has there been for him to see?” she demanded. “Nothing, except that one kiss in the canyon2, and he couldn’t have seen that. Do you think of anything else—I challenge you, sir.”
“Would that there were,” he met the lighter3 touch in her mood, then immediately relapsed. “I am mad over you, mad for you. And there I stop. I do not know if you are equally mad. I do not know if you are mad at all.”
As he spoke4, he dropped his hand to hers on the keys, and she gently withdrew it.
“Don’t you see?” he complained. “Yet you wanted me to come back?”
“I wanted you to come back,” she acknowledged, with her straight look into his eyes. “I wanted you to come back,” she repeated, more softly, as if musing5.
“And I’m all at sea,” he exclaimed impatiently. “You do love me?”
“I do love you, Evan—you know that. But...” She paused and seemed to be weighing the matter judicially6.
“But what?” he commanded. “Go on.”
“But I love Dick, too. Isn’t it ridiculous?”
He did not respond to her smile, and her eyes delightedly warmed to the boyish sullenness7 that vexed8 his own eyes. A thought was hot on his tongue, but he restrained the utterance9 of it while she wondered what it was, disappointed not to have had it.
“It will work out,” she assured him gravely. “It will have to work out somehow. Dick says all things work out. All is change. What is static is dead, and we’re not dead, any of us... are we?”
“I don’t blame you for loving Dick, for... for continuing to love Dick,” he answered impatiently. “And for that matter, I don’t see what you find in me compared with him. This is honest. He is a great man to me, and Great Heart is his name—” she rewarded him with a smile and nod of approval. “But if you continue to love Dick, how about me?”
“But I love you, too.”
“It can’t be,” he cried, tearing himself from the piano to make a hasty march across the room and stand contemplating10 the Keith on the opposite wall as if he had never seen it before.
She waited with a quiet smile, pleasuring in his unruly impetuousness.
“You can’t love two men at once,” he flung at her.
“Oh, but I do, Evan. That’s what I am trying to work out. Only I don’t know which I love more. Dick I have known a long time. You... you are a—”
“Recent acquaintance,” he broke in, returning to her with the same angry stride.
“Not that, no, not that, Evan. You have made a revelation to me of myself. I love you as much as Dick. I love you more. I—I don’t know.”
She broke down and buried her face in her hands, permitting his hand to rest tenderly on her shoulder.
“You see it is not easy for me,” she went on. “There is so much involved, so much that I cannot understand. You say you are all at sea. Then think of me all at sea and worse confounded. You—oh, why talk about it—you are a man with a man’s experiences, with a man’s nature. It is all very simple to you. ’She loves me, she loves me not.’ But I am tangled11, confused. I—and I wasn’t born yesterday—have had no experience in loving variously. I have never had affairs. I loved only one man... and now you. You, and this love for you, have broken into a perfect marriage, Evan—”
“I know—” he said.
“—I don’t know,” she went on. “I must have time, either to work it out myself or to let it work itself out. If it only weren’t for Dick...” her voice trailed off pathetically.
Unconsciously, Graham’s hand went farther about her shoulder.
“No, no—not yet,” she said softly, as softly she removed it, her own lingering caressingly12 on his a moment ere she released it. “When you touch me, I can’t think,” she begged. “I—I can’t think.”
“Then I must go,” he threatened, without any sense of threatening. She made a gesture of protest. “The present situation is impossible, unbearable13. I feel like a cur, and all the time I know I am not a cur. I hate deception—oh, I can lie with the Pathan, to the Pathan—but I can’t deceive a man like Great Heart. I’d prefer going right up to him and saying: ’Dick, I love your wife. She loves me. What are you going to do about it?’”
“Do so,” Paula said, fired for the moment.
Graham straightened up with resolution.
“I will. And now.”
“No, no,” she cried in sudden panic. “You must go away.” Again her voice trailed off, as she said, “But I can’t let you go.”
If Dick had had any reason to doubt his suspicion of the state of Paula’s heart, that reason vanished with the return of Graham. He need look nowhere for confirmation14 save to Paula. She was in a flushed awakening15, burgeoning16 like the full spring all about them, a happier tone in her happy laugh, a richer song in her throat, a warmness of excitement and a continuous energy of action animating17 her. She was up early and to bed late. She did not conserve18 herself, but seemed to live on the champagne19 of her spirits, until Dick wondered if it was because she did not dare allow herself time to think.
He watched her lose flesh, and acknowledged to himself that the one result was to make her look lovelier than ever, to take on an almost spiritual delicacy20 under her natural vividness of color and charm.
And the Big House ran on in its frictionless21, happy, and remorseless way. Dick sometimes speculated how long it would continue so to run on, and
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