The major had leaned forward in his chair. "Judith!" he said, and his hand twitched, "it isn't true!" And then, "How do you know?"
She smiled at him. "You remember when that big surgeon from Vienna came to see the doctor last year? Well, the doctor brought him to me. I'd known it before in a way, but it had gone farther than I thought. No one can tell just how long it may be. It may be years, of course, but I'm not taking any sea trips, Monty."
He cleared his throat and his voice was husky when he spoke. "Shirley doesn't know?"
"Certainly _not_. She mustn't." And then, in sudden sharpness: "You shan't tell her, Monty. You wouldn't dare!"
"No, indeed," he assured her quickly. "Of course not."
"It's just among us three, Doctor Southall and you and me. We three have had our secrets before, eh, Monty?"
She bent toward him, her hands tightening on the cane. "After all, it's true. To-day I _am_ getting old. I may look only fifty, but I feel sixty and I'll admit to seventy-five. It's joy that keeps us young, and I didn't get my fair share of that, Monty. For just one little week my heart had it all--_all_--and then--well, then it was finished. It was finished long before I married Tom Dandridge. It isn't that I'm empty-headed. It's that I've been an empty-_hearted_ woman, Monty--as empty and dusty and desolate as the old house over yonder on the ridge."
"You've been empty in a way, too," she said. "But it's been a different way. You were never in love--really in love, I mean. Certainly not with me, Monty, though you tried to make me think so once upon a time, before Sassoon came along, and--Beauty Valiant."
The major blinked, suddenly startled. It was out, the one name neither had spoken to the other for thirty years! He looked at her a little guiltily; but her eyes had turned away. They were gazing between the catalpas to where, far off on a gentle rise, the stained gable of a roof thrust up dark and gaunt above its nest of foliage. "Everything changed then," she continued dreamily, "everything."
The major's fingers strayed across his waistcoat, fumbling uncertainly for his eye-glasses. For an instant he, too, was back in the long-ago past, when he and Valiant had been comrades. What a long panorama unfolded at the name; the times when they had been boys fly-fishing in the Rapidan and fox-hunting about Pilot-Knob with the yelping hounds--crisp winters of books and pipes together at the old university at Charlottesville--later maturer years about Damory Court when the trail of sex had deepened into man's passion and the devil's rivalry. It had been a curious three-sided affair--he, and Valiant, and Sassoon. Sassoon with his dissipated flair and ungovernable temper and strange fits of recklessness; clean, high-idealed, straight-away Valiant; and he--a Bristow, neither better nor worse than the rest of his name. He remembered that mad strained season when he had grimly recognized his own cause as hopeless, and with burning eyes had watched Sassoon and Valiant racing abreast. He remembered that glittering prodigal dance when he had come upon Valiant and Judith standing in the shrubbery, the candle-light from some open door engoldening their faces: hers smiling, a little flippant perhaps, and conscious of her spell; his grave and earnest, yet wistful.