The Bubble Bursts - Page 2

case." I repeat with confident rudeness, "Nothing of the
sort is the case. Things are different altogether here; you can
hardly tell even now how different are----"

I discover he is not listening to me.

"What is the matter?" I ask abruptly.

He makes no answer, but his expression startles me.

"What is the matter?" and then I follow his eyes.

A woman and a man are coming through the great archway--and
instantly I guess what has happened. She it is arrests my attention
first--long ago I knew she was a sweetly beautiful woman. She is
fair, with frank blue eyes, that look with a sort of tender
receptivity into her companion's face. For a moment or so they
remain, greyish figures in the cool shadow, against the sunlit
greenery of the gardens beyond.

"It is Mary," the botanist whispers with white lips, but he stares
at the form of the man. His face whitens, it becomes so transfigured
with emotion that for a moment it does not look weak. Then I see
that his thin hand is clenched.

I realise how little I understand his emotions.

A sudden fear of what he will do takes hold of me. He sits white and
tense as the two come into the clearer light of the courtyard. The
man, I see, is one of the samurai, a dark, strong-faced man, a man I
have never seen before, and she is wearing the robe that shows her a
follower of the Lesser Rule.

Some glimmering of the botanist's feelings strikes through to my
slow sympathies. Of course--a strange man! I put out a restraining
hand towards his arm. "I told you," I say, "that very probably, most
probably, she would have met some other. I tried to prepare
you."

"Nonsense," he whispers, without looking at me. "It isn't that.
It's--that scoundrel----"

He has an impulse to rise. "That scoundrel," he repeats.

"He isn't a scoundrel," I say. "How do you know? Keep still! Why are
you standing up?"

He and I stand up quickly, I as soon as he. But now the full meaning
of the group has reached me. I grip his arm. "Be sensible," I say,
speaking very quickly, and with my back to the approaching couple.
"He's not a scoundrel here. This world is different from that. It's
caught his pride somehow and made a man of him. Whatever troubled
them there----"

He turns a face of white wrath on me, of accusation, and for the
moment of unexpected force. "This is _your_ doing," he says. "You
have done this to mock me. He--of all men!" For a moment speech
fails him, then; "You--you have done this to mock me."

I try to explain very quickly. My tone is almost