If nothing more definite had come of all this, I should now see but little significance in those long afternoons of riding with Lucy. She could leave the substance of her trouble behind, as easily as she could have left a pair of gloves, and she took into the saddle with her only a shadow of the tragedy that was glowering upon her house.

I see now, that, at this time, we must have begun to talk more seriously and upon more intimate topics; that we laughed less and that there were longer silences between us. We began to take an interest in the trees and flowers among which we rode, to learn their names, and to linger longer over those which did not at once strike the eye.

And I see now that Lucy talked more than usually about her husband. It was as if by doing constant justice to his character she hoped to make up to him for her failure of affection. In his domestic relations he was a real hero by all accounts. Didn’t I think they lived nicely? She thought so, too, but it wasn’t her fault. She was so extravagant, and such a bad manager, it was a wonder they could live at all. She admitted so much with shame. But if I could understand how it is with some men about drink, then it must be easy for me to understand how it is with some women about money. Oh, she’d spent John into some dreadful holes; but he had always managed to creep out of them. How he hated an unpaid bill! It wasn’t his fault that there were so many of them. For her part (wasn’t it awful!) they filled her neither with shame nor compunction. And he’d been so fine about people. His instinct was to be a scholar and a hermit. But she loved people, she simply couldn’t be happy without them, and (wasn’t it fun?) she had had her way, and now John liked people almost as much as she did. And he had a knack of putting life and laughter into the simplest parties.

Sometimes when we had finished riding, we had tea in the garden. It would be turning cool, and she would slip a heavy coon-skin coat over her riding things; and there was a long voluminous polo-coat of John’s that I used to borrow. Evelyn nearly always joined us, John not so often. Sometimes Dawson Cooper came. He was getting over his shyness. Sometimes he was quite brazen and facetious. It looked almost as if he was being encouraged by someone.

Of the sorrow that was gnawing at John Fulton’s heart I saw no sign. He was alert, hospitable, humorous often, and toward Lucy his manner was wonderfully considerate and gentle. If I had guessed at anything, it would have been that the wife was in trouble and not the husband. He could not sit still for long at a time, but he did not in the least suggest a man who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His activity and sudden shiftings from place to place and from topic to topic were rather those of a man who superabounds in physical and mental energy.

At this time he did not know whether he and Lucy were going to separate or not. If they should, he was already preparing dust to throw in the world’s eyes. He let it be known that at any moment he might have to go to Messina in the interests of his cartridge company (this was a polite fiction) and that he might have to be gone a long time. Business was a hard master. He had always tried to keep it out of his home life, but in times like these a man must be ready to catch at straws.

And Lucy, just her head and fingers showing from the great coon-skin coat, would give him a look that I should not now interpret as I did then. I thought that it made her feel sick at heart even to think of his going to some far-off place without her!

“Speaking of far-off places,” I said once, “Gerald Colebridge is taking some men to Burlingham to play polo. He’s asked me, and I’m tempted almost beyond my strength. What does everybody think?”

“I’d go like a shot,” said Dawson Cooper. “Gerald will take his car and everything will be beautifully done; and California just about now!” Here he bunched his fingers, kissed them and sent the kiss heavenward.

“Wish I was asked!” exclaimed Evelyn.

“Ever been to California?” Fulton asked. “Because if not, go. And still I’ve thought sometimes that spring in Aiken is almost as lovely.”

Poor fellow, it must have been quite obvious that he didn’t think so any more. But then Evelyn, Dawson, and I were blind and deaf, at this time.

“When,” said Lucy at last, “would you go, if you go?”

“Why, in a day or two,” I said. “I’d probably leave day after tomorrow on the three o’clock and join the party in New York.”

“Oh, dear,” she said, “I’ll have to take up golf then. You’re the only man in Aiken who likes to ride. And John won’t let me ride alone.”

“Why not,” said he, “ask me to ride with you?”

“Oh, I know you’d do it,” she said. “You’re a hero, but I’m not quite such a brute.”

I wish I could have gone to California.

I rode with Lucy the next afternoon, for the last time as we both thought. As we came home through Lover’s Lane, the ponies walking very slowly, she leaned toward me a little, turned the great praying eyes upon me, and said, her mouth smiling falteringly:

“Please don’t go away. I hate it. Everything’s gone all wrong with the world. And if you’re not my friend that I can talk to and tell things to, I haven’t one.”

“Are you serious, Lucy?”

“Oh, it’s no matter!” she said lightly, and began to gather her reins, preparatory to a gallop.

“It’s only that it didn’t seem possible that you could need one particular friend out of so many. Of course, I stay. Will you tell me now what it is that’s gone all wrong?”

“Yes,” she said with a quickly drawn breath. “I’ve had to tell John that I don’t love him any more, and don’t want to be his wife.”

If one of those still and stately pines which lend Lover’s Lane the appearance of a cathedral aisle had fallen across my shoulders, I could hardly have been more suddenly stunned.

When I looked at her the corners of her lovely mouth were down like those of a child in trouble.

“Please don’t look at me,” she said.

We rode on very slowly in silence. Sometimes, without looking, I could not be sure that she was still crying. Then I would hear a little pathetic sniffling a catching of the breath. Or she would fall to pounding the thigh with her fist.

But she pulled herself together very quickly and borrowed my handkerchief and when we reached the telegraph office her own husband could not have known that she had been crying.

She held my pony while I telegraphed Gerald Colebridge that I could not go to California with him.

Far from looking like one who had recently been crying, she looked a triumphant little creature, as she sat the one pony, and held the other. The color had all come back to her face, and she looked why, she looked happy!