Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/1000

928 the lighthouse. Curiously enough, it was she and not he who suddenly remembered that they must be seen returning side by side.

Mrs. McTavish herself came to meet them. Her face was anxious and her manner excited.

"I was just on the point of sending for you," she exclaimed. "I think we must all go back. The Bournes have had bad news—a telegram that Perkins brought over. The young man whom Daisy was to marry has been killed in a railway accident in Colorado. They're gone. They took the runabout and mean to try for the last afternoon train."

She pointed to a spot of black that wound its slow way through the gray of the sand-dunes towards the sunset.

Hepner told me the rest of the story last year. I had been dining with him that night at Miss Severn's, where we had met, under the patronage of the Botticelli in her drawing-room—promised to the art museum if that institution behaves itself during her lifetime,—a number of distinguished people.

"Certainly she has a salon," he said, in answer to a remark of mine as we turned down the shadowed street, "or as near one as our climate will allow. She is rather a unique figure in the local civilization, too, with a reputation for appreciation that is deserved and for criticism that is"—he shrugged his shoulders—"inevitable; and personally she is credited with having undergone a good deal of suffering during these last few years, which, in the minds of her women friends at least, lends a tremendous cachet; they like vicarious emotions—these understudies,—but that, by Jove!" (he had stopped and suddenly faced me under a street lamp)—"I don't believe and I can't endure!"

"You are speaking of the episode of Harry Doane?" I suggested.

"Yes." The man's voice was serious. "You know the story, of course, and I dare say, like the rest of them, you think that she renounced him and then sat down to eat out her heart in silence the rest of her days, while he bounded away and met a hero's death in Cuba—an unfortunate but fitting end for a young life. Decorum pro patria mori, and all that rot. Well, I can tell you the truth about it. I don't want to be unjust to her, but it never seemed to me that she found it very hard to send him away, and—it just killed him, when she did! He'd no more idea of going to Cuba than I had when that thing happened at Mrs. McTavish's. He came back to town, and he said to me, 'John, I've got to paint like hell now,' and he tried, poor chap, but the heart had gone out of the boy and he couldn't. He kept more and more to himself, and grew quieter and quieter, and the next thing I knew he told me that he'd enlisted. I said nothing; I don't believe in bothering people after they've done a thing, and so he went.

"They found him dead after that cursed charge, and one of his friends brought me, when he came back, something that Harry said I was to have. And what do you think it was? Why, a picture of that woman, in a little gold frame that my poor boy had worn about his neck."

Hepner's tone was tender. He stood a moment before we parted.

"I wonder if I ought to send it back to Joanna! I wish I knew. I am not sure of that woman; I confess I don't understand her. I may be wrong, but I've got my idea of her.

"By the way, I'm going to paint a portrait of her this spring, and then you shall see!"