His look grew gently commiserating. “I think you’ll find—” he paused for a word—“that things are different now—altogether easier.”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering—ever since we started.” She was determined now to speak. She moved nearer, so that their arms touched, and she could drop her voice to a murmur. “You see, it all came on me in a flash. My going off to India and Siam on that long trip kept me away from letters for weeks at a time; and she didn’t want to tell me beforehand—oh, I understand that, poor child! You know how good she’s always been to me; how she’s tried to spare me. And she knew, of course, what a state of horror I’d be in. She knew I’d rush off to her at once and try to stop it. So she never gave me a hint of anything, and she even managed to muzzle Susy Suffern—you know Susy is the one of the family who keeps me informed about things at home. I don’t yet see how she prevented Susy’s telling me; but she did. And her first letter, the one I got up at Bangkok, simply said the thing was over—the divorce, I mean—and that the very next day she’d—well, I suppose there was no use waiting; and he seems to have behaved as well as possible, to have wanted to marry her as much as—”
“Who? Barkley?” he helped her out. “I should say so! Why what do you suppose—” He interrupted himself. “He’ll be devoted to her, I assure you.”
“Oh, of course; I’m sure he will. He’s written me—really beautifully. But it’s a terrible strain on a man’s devotion. I’m not sure that Leila realizes—”
Ide sounded again his little reassuring laugh. “I’m not sure that you realize. They’re all right.”
It was the very phrase that the young lady in the next seat had applied to the unknown “Leila,” and its recurrence on Ide’s lips flushed Mrs. Lidcote with fresh courage.
“I wish I knew just what you mean. The two young women next to me—the ones with the wonderful hats—have been talking in the same way.”
“What? About Leila?”
“About a Leila; I fancied it might be mine. And about society in general. All their friends seem to be divorced; some of them seem to announce their engagements before they get their decree. One of them—her name was Mabel—as far as I could make out, her husband found out that she meant to divorce him by noticing that she wore a new engagement-ring.”
“Well, you see Leila did everything ‘regularly,’ as the French say,” Ide rejoined.
“Yes; but are these people in society? The people my neighbours talk about?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “It would take an arbitration commission a good many sittings to define the boundaries of society nowadays. But at any rate they’re in New York; and I assure you you’re not; you’re farther and farther from it.”
“But I’ve been back there several times to see Leila.” She hesitated and looked away from him. Then she brought out slowly: “And I’ve never noticed—the least change—in—in my own case—”
“Oh,” he sounded deprecatingly, and she trembled with the fear of having gone too far. But the hour was past when such scruples could restrain her. She must know where she was and where Leila was. “Mrs. Boulger still cuts me,” she brought out with an embarrassed laugh.
“Are you sure? You’ve probably cut her; if not now, at least in the past. And in a cut if you’re not first you’re nowhere. That’s what keeps up so many quarrels.”
The word roused Mrs. Lidcote to a renewed sense of realities. “But the Pursues,” she said—“the Pursues are so strong! There are so many of them, and they all back each other up, just as my husband’s family did. I know what it means to have a clan against one. They’re stronger than any number of separate friends. The Pursues will never forgive Leila for leaving Horace. Why, his mother opposed his marrying her because of—of me. She tried to get Leila to promise that she wouldn’t see me when they went to Europe on their honeymoon. And now she’ll say it was my example.”
Her companion, vaguely stroking his beard, mused a moment upon this; then he asked, with seeming irrelevance, “What did Leila say when you wrote that you were coming?”
“She said it wasn’t the least necessary, but that I’d better come, because it was the only way to convince me that it wasn’t.”
“Well, then, that proves she’s not afraid of the Purshes.”
She breathed a long sigh of remembrance. “Oh, just at first, you know—one never is.”
He laid his hand on hers with a gesture of intelligence and pity. “You’ll see, you’ll see,” he said.
A shadow lengthened down the deck before them, and a steward stood there, proffering a Marconigram.
“Oh, now I shall know!” she exclaimed.
She tore the message open, and then let it fall on her knees, dropping her hands on it in silence.
Ide’s enquiry roused her: “It’s all right?”
“Oh, quite right. Perfectly. She can’t come; but she’s sending Susy Suffern. She says Susy will explain.” After another silence she added, with a sudden gush of bitterness: “As if I needed any explanation!”
She felt Ide’s hesitating glance upon her. “She’s in the country?”
“Yes. ‘Prevented last moment. Longing for you, expecting you. Love from both.’ Don’t you see, the poor darling, that she couldn’t face it?”
“No, I don’t.” He waited. “Do you mean to go to her immediately?”
“It will be too late to catch a train this evening; but I shall take the first tomorrow morning.” She considered a moment. “‘Perhaps it’s better. I need a talk with Susy first. She’s to meet me at the dock, and I’ll take her straight back to the hotel with me.”
As she developed this plan, she had the sense that Ide was still thoughtfully, even gravely, considering her. When she ceased, he remained silent a moment; then he said almost ceremoniously: “If your talk with Miss Suffern doesn’t last too late, may I come and see you when it’s over? I shall be dining at my club, and I’ll call you up at about ten, if I may. I’m off to Chicago on business tomorrow morning, and it would be a satisfaction to know, before I start, that your cousin’s been able to reassure you, as I know she will.”
He spoke with a shy deliberateness that, even to Mrs. Lidcote’s troubled perceptions, sounded a long-silenced note of feeling. Perhaps the breaking down of the barrier of reticence between them had released unsuspected emotions in both. The tone of his appeal moved her curiously and loosened the tight strain of her fears.
“Oh, yes, come—do come,” she said, rising. The huge threat of New York was imminent now, dwarfing, under long reaches of embattled masonry, the great deck she stood on and all the little specks of life it carried. One of them, drifting nearer, took the shape of her maid, followed by luggage-laden stewards, and signing to her that it was time to go below. As they descended to the main deck, the throng swept her against Mrs. Lorin Boulger’s shoulder, and she heard the ambassadress call out to some one, over the vexed sea of hats: “So sorry! I should have been delighted, but I’ve promised to spend Sunday with some friends at Lenox.”
II
Susy Suffern’s explanation did not end till after ten o’clock, and she had just gone when Franklin Ide, who, complying with an old New York tradition, had caused himself to be preceded by a long white box of roses, was shown into Mrs. Lidcote’s sitting-room.
He came forward with his shy half-humorous smile and, taking her hand, looked at her for a moment without speaking.
“It’s all right,” he then pronounced.
Mrs. Lidcote returned his smile. “It’s extraordinary. Everything’s changed. Even Susy has changed; and you know the extent to which