s
human pain and injury. He thought of Georgie's tall and graceful figure,
and he shivered, but his bitterness was untouched. He had never blamed
Isabel for the weakness which had cost them the few years of happiness
they might have had together; he had put the blame all on the son, and
it stayed there.

He began to think poignantly of Isabel: he had seldom been able to "see"
her more clearly than as he sat looking out of his compartment window,
after reading the account of this accident. She might have been just on
the other side of the glass, looking in at him--and then he thought of
her as the pale figure of a woman, seen yet unseen, flying through the
air, beside the train, over the fields of springtime green and through
the woods that were just sprouting out their little leaves. He closed
his eyes and saw her as she had been long ago. He saw the brown-eyed,
brown-haired, proud, gentle, laughing girl he had known when first he
came to town, a boy just out of the State College. He remembered--as he
had remembered ten thousand times before--the look she gave him when
her brother George introduced him to her at a picnic; it was "like hazel
starlight" he had written her, in a poem, afterward. He remembered
his first call at the Amberson Mansion, and what a great personage she
seemed, at home in that magnificence; and yet so gay and friendly. He
remembered the first time he had danced with her--and the old waltz song
began to beat in his ears and in his heart. They laughed and sang it
together as they danced to it:

"Oh, love for a year, a week, a day, But alas for the love that lasts
always--"

Most plainly of all he could see her dancing; and he became articulate
in the mourning whisper: "So graceful--oh, so graceful--"

All the way to New York it seemed to him that Isabel was near him, and
he wrote of her to Lucy from his hotel the next night:

I saw an account of the accident to George Minafer. I'm sorry, though
the paper states that it was plainly his own fault. I suppose it may
have been as a result of my attention falling upon the item that I
thought of his mother a great deal on the way here. It seemed to me that
I had never seen her more distinctly or so constantly, but, as you know,
thinking of his mother is not very apt to make me admire him! Of course,
however, he has my best wishes for his recovery.

He posted the letter, and by the morning's mail he received one from
Lucy written a few hours after hi