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Updated: May 9, 2025
"Perhaps it was she who kept me from being worse," Maurice recognized in a flash; "not I myself!" "Why, Mrs. Carstang, I didn't know you were here!" he spoke, with warmth around the heart. "We came at noon." "And I was in the woods all day." Maurice greeted the red-cheeked, elderly Mr.
There was no cognizance of anything except this one maddening girl. She absorbed him. She wrung the strength of his manhood from him as tribute, such tribute as everybody paid her, even Mrs. Carstang. He sat like a rock, tranced by the strong control which he kept over himself. "I must go,"-said Lily. She had not sat down at all. Maurice shuffled his papers. "Good-bye," she spoke.
The morning was chill, and she seemed a fair Russian in fur-edged cloth as she put her cold fingers teasingly against his neck. "Are you working hard?" "Trying to. I am behind." "But if there is a good wind this afternoon you are not to forget the Carstangs' sail. They will be here only a day or two, and you mustn't neglect them. Mrs. Carstang told me if I saw you first to invite you."
Carstang gave him sweet friendship, and he sat by her with the unchanging loyalty of a devotee to an altar from which the sacrament has been removed. Next morning Lily did not come to the lime-kiln. Maurice worked furiously all day, and corrected proof in his room at night, though tableaux were shown in the casino, both Mrs. Carstang and Lily being head and front of the undertaking.
"You resemble her," said Maurice. "You have the blond head, and the same features only a little more delicate." "I have been in her parlor all morning," said Lily. "We talked about you. I am certain, Maurice, Mrs. Carstang is in her heart still faithful to you." That she should thrust the old love on him as a kind of solace seemed the cruelest of all.
One can say much behind the lips and make no sound at all. "If I drench her with my love and she does not know it," thought Maurice, "it cannot annoy her. Let me take what she is willing to give, and ask no more." "The Carstangs are gone," said Lily. "Yes; I bade them good-bye this morning before I came to the lime-kiln." "You don't say you regret their going." "I never seek Mrs. Carstang."
Carstang, whom, according to half the world, his wife doted upon, and according to the other half, she simply endured. At any rate, he looked pleased with his lot. While Maurice stood talking with Mrs. Carstang, the new grief and the old strangely neutralized each other. It was as if they met and grappled, and he had numb peace. The woman of his first love made him proud of that early bond.
The second day Lily did not come to the limekiln. But he saw her pass along the grassy avenue in front of his study with Mrs. Carstang, a man on each side of them. They waved their hands to him. Maurice sat with his head on his desk all the afternoon, beaten and broken-hearted.
Maurice met the girl's smiling eyes, and the ice of her hand went through him. "Isn't Mrs. Carstang lovely! As soon as I saw you come in last night, I knew she was the other woman." "You didn't look at me." "I can see with my eyelashes. Do you know, I have often thought I should love her if I were a man!" There was not a trace of jealousy in Lily's gentle and perfect manner.
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