At that minute Jim was alive for us all three. We were living with him in the past. I think none of us saw the little stuffy room where we sat. Only our bodies were there, like the empty, amber shells of locusts when the locusts have freed themselves and vanished. I was in a rose arbour, on a day of late June, in a garden by a canal that led to Belgium. The Becketts were in their house across the sea.
"Why," his mother hesitated, "it was quite a story. But when he found you again he must have told you it all."
"Well, it began with a landlady in a hotel wanting him to see a picture. The artist was away, but his sister was there. That was you, my dear."
"Yes, it was I. My poor Brian painted such beautiful things before----"
"We know they were beautiful, because we've seen the picture," Father Beckett broke in. "But go on, Mother. We'll tell about the picture by and by. She'll like to hear. But the rest first!"
The little old lady obeyed, and went on. "Jimmy said he was taken to a room, and there stood the most wonderful girl he'd ever seen in his life--his 'dream come alive.' That's how he described her. And there was more. Father, I never told you this part. But maybe Miss--Miss----"
"Maybe 'Mary' would like to hear. Of course I never forgot one word. No mother could forget! And now I see he described you just right. When you hear, you'll know it was love made his talk about you poetry-like. Jimmy never talked that way to me of any one, before or since."
Padre, I am going to write down the things he said of me, because it is exquisite to know that he thought them. He said, I had eyes "like sapphires fallen among dark grasses." And my hair was so heavy and thick that, if I pulled out the pins, it would fall around me "in a black avalanche."
Ah, the joy and the pain of hearing these words like an echo of music I had nearly missed! There's no language for what I felt. But you will understand.
He had told his mother about our day together. He said, he kept falling deeper in love every minute, and it was all he could do not to exclaim, "Girl, I simply _must_ marry you!" He dared not say that lest I should refuse, and there would be an end of everything. So he tried as hard as he could to make me like him, and remember him till he should come back, in two weeks. He thought that was the best way; and he would have let his bet slide if he hadn't imagined that a little mystery might make him more interesting in my eyes. Believing that we had met again, Mrs. Beckett supposed that he had explained this to me. But of course it was all new, and when she came to the reason why Jim Wyndham had never come back, I thought for a moment I should faint. He was taken ill in Paris, three days after we parted, with typhoid fever; and though it was never a desperate case--owing to his strong constitution--he was delirious for weeks. Two months passed before he was well enough to look for me, and by that time all trace of us was lost. Brian and I had gone to England long before. Jim's friend--the one with whom he had the bet--wired to the Becketts that he was ill, but not dangerously, and they weren't to come over to France. It was only when he reached home that they knew how serious the trouble had been.