So was he
brought, by the dizzy turn of events, to hoping that loyalty to his own
past love was, for him, the only question, since loyalty to her, in that
respect, had never been expected of him.
Yet, as he took his place beside her and looked at her sitting there in the
golden light, wrapped round in white, very wan and pale, despite her smile,
he felt the strangest, twisted pang of divided desire.
She was wan and she was pale, but she was not cool, she was not gray; he
felt in her, as strongly as in far-off days, the warmth and fragrance, and
knew that it was Imogen who had so cast her into a shadow. Her image had
grown dim on that very first time of seeing Imogen standing as Antigone in
the rapt, hushed theater. That dawn had culminated to-day in the
over-mastering, all-revealing burst of noon, and from its radiance the past
had been hardly visible except as shadow. But now he sat in the moonlight,
the past personified in the quiet presence beside him, and the memory of
noonday itself became mirage-like and uncertain. He almost felt as if he
had been having a wild dream, and that Valerie's glance was the awakening
from it.
To think of Imogen's filial grief and of his promise to her,--a promise
deeply recalled to him by the message of her tear-worn eyes,--to steady his
mind to the task of friendly helpfulness, was to put aside the accompanying
memory of eyes, lips, gold hair on a background of flowering laurel,
was to re-enter, through sane, kind altruism, his old, normal state of
consciousness, and to shut the door on something very sweet and wonderful,
to shut the door--in Imogen's phraseology--on his soul, but, in doing that,
to be loyal to the older hope.
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