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At last the gangway was let down, and the stream of passengers began to flow. In time came the van Tuivers, and their friends gathered to welcome them. I waited; and at last Sylvia came to me outwardly calm but with her emotions in the pressure of her two hands. "Oh, Mary, Mary!" she murmured. "I'm so glad to see you! I'm so glad to see you!" "What has happened?" I asked.
I went West; and when I came back in the fall, to plunge again into my work, I read that the van Tuivers, in their yacht, the "Triton," were in the Mediterranean, and were planning to spend the winter in Japan. And then one day in January, like a bolt from the blue, came a cablegram from Sylvia, dated Cairo: "Sailing for New York, Steamship 'Atlantic, are you there, answer."
It was all I could do to keep from being blown across the station-platform, and I was drenched with the spray and bewildered by the roaring of the waves that beat against the pier beyond. Inside the station, I questioned the agent. The launch of the van Tuivers had not been in that day; if it had been on the way, it must have sought shelter somewhere.
Could it really be true that I had been visiting the van Tuivers in Florida, as old Rossiter Torrance had implied? Needless to say, I did not answer these questions freely. And I really think my visitor was more pained by my uncommunicativeness than she was by my betrayal of her. It was interesting also to notice a subtle difference in her treatment of me.
She was living the life of the pleasure-seeking idlers of the great metropolis, and every time I met her it seemed to me that her character and her appearance had deteriorated. Meantime I picked up scraps of information concerning the van Tuivers.
We could only gaze at each other across the distance, and stamp our feet and beat our hands. There were other friends waiting for the van Tuivers, I saw, and so I held myself in the background, full of a thousand wild speculations. How incredible that Sylvia, arriving with her husband, should have summoned me to meet her!
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