V
The midsummer willow stood motionless in the late August sunshine, not a grey-green leaf stirring, and Jane was sitting at her window looking out at it and thinking of Stephen, when André’s second letter arrived.
Minnie brought it up to her, immediately after the postman’s ring. No one could do too much for Jane now. Jane saw the Italian stamp, the strange transparent paper, before she took it from Minnie’s considerate hand. She had a queer revulsion of feeling the moment she recognized it. An impulse to cast it from her, unread. Jane didn’t want to hear from André. She didn’t want to hear anything he might have to say.
When Minnie had left the room, however, she opened it, very thoughtfully. After all—it couldn’t make any difference. She was glad to see that it was very brief.
“Dear Jane,
“I was terribly surprised and terribly shocked at the news your letter contained. Why, I don’t know. I was always afraid, all these past four years, that I would hear that you were going to marry. I hadn’t counted, though, on just what the sight of my name on an envelope, in your handwriting, would do to me. I haven’t felt ready to answer until just now.
“I hope, awfully, that you will be very happy. That you’re happy now. But I won’t plan to come to the States. I know I don’t want to meet your husband next spring and I think I don’t want to meet you, Jane, ever again. You mean a very special thing to me. No one will ever take your place. But I won’t come to Chicago. Feeling as I do, I should really have nothing to say to you. ‘Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée.’
Well, thought Jane, that was that. But why did he have to write just as he did? Jane frowned over her instant recognition of the pluck the brief note had given to her heart strings. It was unforgettable, like everything else about André.
Jane put it away with his other letter in her desk drawer. She was terribly glad that she would not have to see him. She didn’t want to see André, ever again. He—he shouldn’t have mentioned it, of course, but he was quite right about doors.
A great deal of water had run under the bridge since the April afternoon when his first letter had arrived. Stephen, an authentic hero, had charged up San Juan Hill, following the waving sombrero of Theodore Roosevelt. He was recovering from malarial fever, now, down at Montauk Point. The war was over. Cuba was free. The United States owned the Philippine Islands. Boston had not been bombarded. And Jane had known, for more than three months, that she was going to have a baby in February.