ed the shades. At last, safe from every chance of
espial, she sat down again in her chair before the desk, leaned her
elbows on the desk, and looked desperately, miserably, into the joyous
face of the picture. She did not speak, but her thoughts took on words
and sank like hot lead into her heart. "Max Butler! Max Butler! The
little nephew he told me about. And _he_ has been alive all these years;
and happy; with little sons, while I--I have lied to these trusting
girls. It was wicked and shameless. I deceived myself; then I deceived
them. I wonder why. I knew what they were thinking. How dare I look that
honest child in the face! I suppose she wonders like the rest why I have
not told any one of my romance. And it is simply that there was nothing
to tell. Nothing." She looked into the soldier's happy eyes while her
lips curled and she murmured, drearily and bitterly, "I haven't even the
right to be angry with you, poor lad. What did you do? _You_ are not my
Max; I only made him up out of my heart--like children playing a game!"
Her mind drifted dizzily through shapeless and inconsequent visions of
the past. She was seeing again the grim pile of the ruined castle, the
masses of broken shadow, the intricate carving on arch and architrave
and plinth, the wavering mass of limbs and tree-trunks on the green
sward; and she, with her twisted ankle, was kneeling, trying to peer
through the shrubbery for her lost companions. Did he come by chance?
She had seen the handsome young officer daily, for a week. His
great-aunt was Margaret's right-hand neighbor at the pension table
d'hote, a withered relic of Polish nobility with fine, black eyes in a
face like a hickory nut; who wore shabby gowns and magnificent jewels,
frankly smoked cigarettes, and seemed to have a venomous tale ready to
fit any name mentioned in conversation--with one exception, her
nephew's. According to her, Max's father was a swine and his mother a
fool and his brother a popinjay, and his sister had no respect for her
betters; but Max had a heart. It was understood at the pension that she
was arranging a great match for him. In spite of the general disapproval
of his aunt, he was a favorite, he was so simple, amiable, and polite.
Even the American professor admitted that for a man "who had won the
iron cross in such a spectacular fashion, he was very modest and really
more like an American than a German officer," thus paying the
unconsciously arrogant compliment