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She stood clasping the back of the chair from which she had freed her dress, and looked across it mutinously at Peter. "And what," she quivered, "has Mr. Weatheral to say to me?" "There is nothing," he told her, "that I would say to you, Miss Goodward, unless you wished to hear it." His magnanimity shamed her a little.
"He's not hurt...." Peter laid the moth gently on a feathery flower head, and the tiny whispering whirr began again. "I thought you wanted him." "I did but not to catch him," Miss Goodward explained. "I wanted just to want him." "Ah, I'm afraid I'm one of those people with whom to want a thing is to go after it," Peter justified himself. "So one gathers from what one hears."
He remembered Eunice Goodward the fact of her how tall she was as she walked beside him but not how at the soft brushing of her hair as she turned, his blood had sung to her; nor all the weeks of their engagement like a morning full of wings. And he could not yet recall so much as the bare reasons for her break with him except that they had been unhappy ones.
He found the Goodwards, not in the expensive caravansary in which he installed himself, but in a smaller tributary house set back from the main hotel though not quite disconnected with it; for quiet, Mrs. Goodward told him, though he guessed quite as much from economy.
He had already found out what was the matter with him and what he meant to do about it. Whatever the process of becoming engaged to Eunice Goodward lacked of dramatic interest, it made up to Peter by being such a tremendous adventure for him to become engaged to anybody.
He found her at last by the herbacious border, keeping touch with the flight of a sphinx-head moth along the tall white rockets of phlox. Peter whipped out his handkerchief and dropped it deftly over the fluttering wings. In a moment he had stilled them in his hand. Miss Goodward cried out to him: "You've spoiled his happy evening!"
There had been so many ways to it once, paths to it began in pictures, great towered gates of music gave upon its avenues, and if he had not spoken of it, it was because as he had made himself believe when she did come, that Eunice Goodward would come into it of first right. He could not have blamed her for not wishing to live in it from the first he had never blamed her.
He experienced a great lift of his spirit in the girl's light acceptance of his whimsicality, it was the sort of thing that Eunice Goodward used to be afraid to have any one hear him say lest they should think it odd. It occurred to him as he turned and walked beside Miss Dassonville that if he had come to Italy with Eunice there might have been a great deal that she would not have liked to hear.
Her method of eluding him, if there were method in it, left him feeling not so much avoided as prevented by the moves of a game he hadn't meant to play. So greatly it irked his natural simplicity to be banded about by the social observances of the place, that it might have led him to irrecoverable mistakes had it not been for the hand held out to him by Mrs. Goodward.
He had in the months that succeeded to that last sight of Eunice Goodward, moments of unbearably wanting to go to her to try for a little to ease his torment in a more tender recognition of it days when he would have taken from her, gratefully even if she had fooled him and he had seen her do it, whatever would have saved him from the certainty that never even in those first exquisite moments had she been his.
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