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Lansing drew back into the shadow as the motor swept up to the house. A man jumped out, and the light fell on Strefford's shambling figure, its lazy disjointed movements so unmistakably the same under his fur coat, and in the new setting of prosperity. Lansing stood motionless, staring at the door. Strefford rang, and waited. Would Susy appear again?
Moritz, Egypt or New York, there was no time to hunt up the vanished or to wait for the laggard. She did not know; though she fancied Strefford's newly-developed pride would prevent his revealing to any one what had passed between them. For several days after her abrupt flight he had made no sign; and though she longed to write and ask his forgiveness she could not find the words.
"I wonder what she's given them?" he thought, as he jumped in beside her and the motor whirled them through the nightingale-thickets to the gate. CHARLIE STREFFORD'S villa was like a nest in a rose-bush; the Nelson Vanderlyns' palace called for loftier analogies. Its vastness and splendour seemed, in comparison, oppressive to Susy.
"Yes or the loan of Strefford's villa," her husband emended, glancing upward through the branches at a long low patch of paleness to which the moonlight was beginning to give the form of a white house-front. "Oh, come when we'd five to choose from. At least if you count the Chicago flat." "So we had you wonder!"
"To get me? To get me?" she repeated. Beside the driver she had suddenly remarked the old suit-case from which her husband had obliged her to extract Strefford's cigars as they were leaving Como; and everything that had happened since seemed to fall away and vanish in the pang and rapture of that memory. "To get you; yes. Of course."
She remembered that she had not even asked him to keep her secret. Well after all, what would it matter if people should already know that Nick had left her? Their parting could not long remain a mystery, and the fact that it was known might help her to keep up a presence of indifference. "It was in the bargain in the bargain," rang through her brain as she re-read Strefford's telegram.
But this kiss of Strefford's was what Nick's had been, under the New Hampshire pines, on the day that had decided their fate. It was a kiss with a future in it: like a ring slipped upon her soul.
Yes, there had been a bad moment: but it was over; and she was here, safe and blissful, and with Nick; and this was his knee her head rested on, and they had a year ahead of them... a whole year.... "Not counting the pearls," she murmured, shutting her eyes.... LANSING threw the end of Strefford's expensive cigar into the lake, and bent over his wife. Poor child!
Strefford's face had gradually paled and hardened. From sallow it turned to a dusky white, and lines of obstinacy deepened between the ironic eyebrows and about the weak amused mouth. "Understand? What do you want me to understand," He laughed. "That you're trying to chuck me already?"
Late as the season was, their presence and Strefford's in Venice had already drawn thither several wandering members of their set. It was characteristic of these indifferent but agglutinative people that they could never remain long parted from each other without a dim sense of uneasiness. Lansing was familiar with the feeling.
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