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GARWOOD, as he sat in the cool drawing-room that morning, rehearsed again, and, as he suddenly remembered, for the last time, the scene he was about to enact with Emily. He had thought the matter all out, and with his quick perception of the theatrical quality of any situation, he had prepared for it just as he would for a public speech or, when he had the time, for an argument before a jury. As he sat this morning, taking his eye for a moment from the hall door to glance through the open window into the yard, he beheld old Jasper raking the lawn, heard him talking to himself in an expostulatory tone, and knew that the old man was just putting the finishing touches to some imaginary opponent he had vanquished in an argument. And Garwood smiled, and felt a sympathy with the old fellow; he, too, was given to the practice of talking to himself; if the speeches he delivered when walking home at night could only be reproduced on the stump, he would have no fears whatever of the result.
As he looked out the window he became telepathically aware of a presence, and turned to behold Emily standing in the wide door that led into the hall, parting the heavy curtains with trembling hands. He sprang to his feet and took a step towards her. She advanced to meet him, she stretched out her hands, she took him by the arms; she turned him half around that the light might fall full in his face, and then she let her eyes melt into his. And before he could move, or say one word of all he had intended to say, her face gladdened like the sky at dawn, and she smiled and said:
“Ah, Jerome—I knew it, I knew it!”
And then she hid herself against his breast, and he put his arms about her.
“Did you ever believe it for one little instant?” he whispered, bending over her, after he had drunk to the uttermost the ecstasy and the anguish of that moment.
“Not for one little instant,” she whispered. “Oh, not for one little instant! I knew it couldn’t be!”
And Garwood, looking over the masses of her hair, again saw old Jasper working away in the yard. He was singing now, and Garwood knew that ever after in his memory the aged negro would live in association with that scene.
When they were sitting on the divan, side by side, and the morning was gone, Emily asked him, out of the half-affected simplicity Garwood loved to have her adopt, as most men do, because of the tribute to their superior intelligence it implies:
“Jerome, what is a roorback?”
He was silent for a moment, and then he said:
“A roorback, dear, is a lie told because of the necessities of politics.”
“And are lies necessary in politics?”
“Always, it seems,” he said.