Where the Path Breaks

								

white house. He--whoever he was--had to go away. He was begging the
girl to stop until he came back. "If I do come back," he added. "Your
mother is willing to stay if you are. It would make me happy to think
of you in my house, and if anything happens to me...."
"Oh, don't speak of such things!" she broke in. "It's terrible that you
must go."
This was very kind of her, because it was not reasonable that she could
really care much--such a girl--for such a man, who had never been able
to interest her, he felt. But she looked at him, looked up mistily with
her dear eyes of smoke-blue. There was some message in them, behind a
glaze of tears.
Drowned in those eyes, he heard himself stammering out things he had
not thought that he would ever dare to say. "If you could marry me ...
I don't suppose you could ... but if...."
Her answer did not come into the dream. Perhaps she had not answered.
But he could see the ugly man holding out his hands, and the girl
putting her hands into them. He could see her looking up at him again,
and in the beautiful eyes there was that message she wanted him to
read. There, at that place, was the end of the dream-picture; it never
went further, though he tried over and over to carry it on; the girl
looking up, a tall slender shape in white, with the afternoon sun
burnishing her hair, and giving to it the color of a copper beech tree
under which she stood. He knew that he had thought, "I shall never
forget her as she is now, not even when I'm dead." He had kept his
word. He was dead; hovering on the borderland of the unknown: and he
had not forgotten. But just where the dream ended, before he could read
the girl's look and hear what she had to say, her mother had come
quickly out of the house, with an open book in her hand. That seemed to
be the reason why the picture broke.
It seemed afterwards too, though there was no clear vision, that the
girl was willing to marry him, just barely willing. Her mother took it
for granted that she had said "yes" when he asked her, and the girl let
it go as if it were true; though he could not be sure it was what she
had meant when she looked up with the strange light in her eyes, and
tried to speak. He would have given years of the future he hoped for
then, to have been sure, without any doubts.
When he stammered out his questions he had not thought of anything
better than an engagement, to end in marriage if he came home safely
after the war.... The war!... Dim remembrance of hideous suffering
suddenly stirred the slow current of his dream. There had been war.
That was how it had happened! He had been killed in battle. Or else,
none of the dream was true! There had been no such man, no such girl,
no such black and white house reflected in a crystal lake. This was a
dream of things that had never been. A veil of unreality began to fall
between him and the picture he had seen. No, it couldn't have been true