Why, your mother is like a sweet child beside
you! She hasn't faiths; she hasn't that healing, strengthening thing that
I've always so felt in you. She could never _mean_ what you do. Oh, Imogen!
you won't think such dreadful things, will you? You do forgive me if I have
blundered and hurt you?"
Imogen drew in the fragrant incense with long breaths; it revived her,
filled her veins with new courage, new hope. The two girls kissed solemnly.
They were going out together and they presently went down-stairs hand in
hand. But as an after-flavor there lingered for Imogen, like a faint, flat
bitterness after the incense, a suspicion that Mary, in wafting her censer
with such energy, had been seeking to fill her own nostrils, also, with the
sacred old aroma, to find, as well as give, the intoxication of faith.
XIV
"Sir Basil!" Valeria exclaimed.
She rose from the tea-table, where she and Jack and Mrs. Wake were sitting,
to meet the unexpected new-comer.
A gladness that Jack had never seen in her seemed to inundate her face,
her figure, her outstretched hands; she looked young, she looked almost
childlike, as she smiled at her friend over their clasp, and Jack saw, by
the light of that transfiguration, how gray these last months must have
been to her, how strangely bereft of response and admiration, how without
savor or sweetness. He saw, and with the insight came a sharp stir of
bitterness against the new-comer, who threw them all like this into a dull
background, and, at the same time, a real echo of her gladness, that she
should have it.
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