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Page 27
"And what does he do," she murmured, "the first of all upon his return?
Asks to see me--me!"
She sent an answer to his note by the same boy who brought it, naming
the following afternoon, explaining that two days later she expected to
go into the country to a little town called Bannister to take her annual
fortnight's vacation.
"But what of--of the other?" she murmured as she stood at the window of
her room watching the messenger boy bicycling across the square. "Why
does not he--he, too--?"
She put her chin in the air and turned about, looking abstractedly at
the rugs on the parquetry.
Lloyd's vacation had really begun two days before. Her name was off the
roster of the house, and till the end of the month her time was her own.
The afternoon was hot and very still. Even in the cool, stone-built
agency, with its windows wide and heavily shaded with awnings, the heat
was oppressive. For a long time Lloyd had been shut away from fresh air
and the sun, and now she suddenly decided to drive out in the City's
park. She rang up her stable and ordered Lewis to put her ponies to her
phaeton.
She spent a delightful two hours in the great park, losing herself in
its farthest, shadiest, and most unfrequented corners. She drove
herself, and intelligently. Horses were her passion, and not Lewis
himself understood their care and management better. Toward the cool of
the day and just as she had pulled the ponies down to a walk in a long,
deserted avenue overspanned with elms and great cottonwoods she was all
at once aware of an open carriage that had turned into the far end of
the same avenue approaching at an easy trot. It drew near, and she saw
that its only occupant was a man leaning back rather limply in the
cushions. As the eye of the trained nurse fell upon him she at once
placed him in the category of convalescents or chronic invalids, and she
was vaguely speculating as to the nature of his complaint when the
carriage drew opposite her phaeton, and she recognised Richard Ferriss.
Ferriss, but not the same Ferriss to whom she had said good-bye on that
never-to-be-forgotten March afternoon, with its gusts and rain, four
long years ago. The Ferriss she had known then had been an alert, keen
man, with quick, bright eyes, alive to every impression, responsive to
every sensation, living his full allowance of life. She was looking now
at a man unnaturally old, of deadened nerves, listless. As he caught
sight of her and recognised her he suddenly roused himself with a quick,
glad smile and with a look in his eyes that to Lloyd was unmistakable.
But there was not that joyful, exuberant start she had anticipated, and,
for that matter, wished. Neither did Lloyd set any too great store by
the small amenities of life, but that Ferriss should remain covered hurt
her a little. She wondered how she could note so trivial a detail at
such a moment. But this was Ferriss.
Her heart was beating fast and thick as she halted her ponies. The
driver of the carriage jumped down and held the door for Ferriss, and
the chief engineer stepped quickly toward her.
So it was they met after four years--and such years--unexpectedly,
without warning or preparation, and not at all as she had expected. What
they said to each other in those first few moments Lloyd could never
afterward clearly remember. One incident alone detached itself vividly
from the blur.
"I have just come from the square," Ferriss had explained, "and they
told me that you had left for a drive out here only the moment before,
so there was nothing for it but to come after you."
"Shan't we walk a little?" she remembered she had asked after a while.
"We can have the carriages wait; or do you feel strong enough? I
forgot--"
But he interrupted her, protesting his fitness.
"The doctor merely sent me out to get the air, and it's humiliating to
be wheeled about like an old woman."
Lloyd passed the reins back of her to Lewis, and, gathering her skirts
about her, started to descend from the phaeton. The step was rather high
from the ground. Ferriss stood close by. Why did he not help her? Why
did he stand there, his hands in his pockets, so listless and
unconscious of her difficulty. A little glow of irritation deepened the
dull crimson of her cheeks. Even returned Arctic explorers could not
afford to ignore entirely life's little courtesies--and he of all men.
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