“You ‘think someone told’ you!”
Noble groaned. “Oh, Julia! And here
it is, all down in black and white, in my pocket!”
“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re
talking about.” Julia’s tone was
cold, and she drew herself up haughtily, though the
gesture was ineffective in the darkness of that quivering
interior. The quivering stopped just then, however,
as the taxicab came to a rather abrupt halt before
her house.
“Will you come in with me a moment, please?”
Julia said as she got out. “There are some
things I want to ask you—and I’m sure
my father hasn’t come home from downtown yet.
There’s no light in the front part of the house.”
There was no light in any other part of the house,
they discovered, after abandoning the front door bell
for an excursion to the rear. “That’s
disheartening to a hungry person,” Julia remarked:
and then remembered that she had a key to the front
door in her purse. She opened the door, and lighted
the hall chandelier while Noble brought in her bags
from the steps where the taxicab driver had left them.
“There’s nobody home at all,” Julia
said thoughtfully. “Not even Gamin.”
“No. Nobody,” her sad companion agreed,
shaking his head. “Nobody at all, Julia.
Nobody at all.” Rousing himself, he went
back for the golf tools, and with a lingering gentleness
set them in a corner. Then, dumbly, he turned
to go.
“Wait, please,” said Julia. “I
want to ask you a few things—especially
about what you’ve got ‘all down in black
and white’ in your pocket. Will you shut
the front door, if you please, and go into the library
and turn on the lights and wait there while I look
over the house and see if I can find why it’s
all closed up like this?”
Noble went into the library and found the control
of the lights. She came hurrying in after him.
“It’s chilly. The furnace seems to
be off,” she said. “I’ll——”
But instead of declaring her intentions, she enacted
them; taking a match from a little white porcelain
trough on the mantelpiece and striking it on the heel
of her glittering shoe. Then she knelt before
the grate and set the flame to paper beneath the kindling-wood
and coal. “You mustn’t freeze,”
she said, with a thoughtful kindness that killed him;
and as she went out of the room he died again;—for
she looked back over her shoulder.
She had pushed up her veils and this was his first
sight of that disastrous face in long empty weeks
and weeks. Now he realized that all his aching
reveries upon its contours had shown but pallid likenesses;
for here was the worst thing about Julia’s looks;—even
her most extravagant suitor, in absence, could not
dream an image of her so charming as he found herself
when he saw her again. Thus, seeing Julia again
was always a discovery. And this glance over her
shoulder as she left a room—not a honeyed
glance but rather inscrutable, yet implying that she
thought of the occupant, and might continue to think
of him while gone from him—this was one
of those ways of hers that experience could never
drill out of her.
