Gaiety was left to Prim and the wounded Englishman and to young Oldershaw and the towering Regina who continually threw back her head to emit howls of laughter at Barclay's drolleries while she displayed the large red cavern of her mouth and all her wonderful teeth.After every one of these exhausting paroxysms she said, with her characteristic exuberance of sociability, "Isn't he the best thing?""Don't you think he's the most fascinating creature?" to any one whose eye she caught,--a nice, big, beautiful, insincere girl who had been taught at her fashionable school that in order to succeed in Society and help things along she must rave about everything in extravagant language and make as much noise as her lungs would permit.
Joan's unusual lack of spirits was noticed by every one and especially, with grim satisfaction, by Gilbert Palgrave.With a return of optimism he told himself that his rudeness expressed so pungently had had its effect.He congratulated himself upon having, at last, been able to show Joan the sort of foolish figure that she cut in his sight and even went so far as to persuade himself that, after all, she must do something more than like him to be so silent and depressed.
His deductions were, however, as hopelessly wrong as usual.His drastic criticism had been like water on a duck's back.It inspired amusement and nothing else.It was his remark that Martin Gray had chucked her and found some human real person that had stuck, and this, with the efficiency of a surgeon's knife, had cut her sham complacence and opened up the old wound from which she had tried so hard to persuade herself that she had recovered.Martin-Martin-what was he doing? Where was he, and where was that girl with the white face and the red lips and the hair that came out of a bottle?
The old overwhelming desire to see Martin again had been unconsciously set blazing by this tactless and provoked man.It was so passionate and irresistible that she could hardly remain at the table until the replete Cornucopia rose, rattling with beads.And when, after what seemed to be an interminable time, this happened and the party adjourned to the shaded veranda to smoke and catch the faint breeze from the sea, she instantly beckoned to Harry and made for the drawing-room.
In this furniture be-clogged room all the windows were open, but the blazing sun of the morning had left it hot and stuffy.A hideous squatting Chinese goddess, whose tongue, by a mechanical appliance, lolled from side to side, appeared to be panting for breath, and the cut flowers in numerous pompous vases hung their limp heads.It was a gorgeously hot day.
Young Oldershaw bounded in, the picture of unrealized health.His tan was almost black, and his teeth and the whites of, his eyes positively gleamed.He might have been a Cuban.
"Didn't I hear you tell Prim last night that you'd had a letter from your cousin?""Old Howard? Yes." He was sorry that she had.
"Is Martin with him?" It was an inspiration, an uncanny piece of feminine intuition.
Young Oldershaw was honest."He's staying with Gray," he said reluctantly.
"Where?"
"At Devon."
"Devon? Isn't that the place we drove to the other day--with a little club and a sort of pier and sailboats gliding about?""Yes.They've got one."
Ah, that was why she had had a queer feeling of Martini** while she had sat there having tea, watching the white sails against the sky.
On one of those boats bending gracefully to the wind Martin must have been.
"Where are they living?"
"In a cottage that belongs to a pal of Gray's, so far as I could gather."In a cottage, together! Then the girl whom she had called "Fairy,"--the girl who was human and real, according to Gilbert, couldn't be, surely couldn't be, with them.
"Will you drive me over?" she asked.
"When?"
"Now."
"Why, of course, Joan, if I--must," he said.It somehow seemed to him to be wrong and incredible that she had a husband,--this girl, so free and young and at the very beginning of things, like himself, and whom he had grown into the habit of regarding as his special-hardly property, but certainly companion and playmate.
"If you're not keen about it, Harry, I'll ask Mr.Hosack or a chauffeur.Pray don't let me take you an inch out of your way."In an instant he was off his stilts and on his marrow bones."Please don't look like that and say those things.You've only got to tell me what you want and I'll get it.You know that.""Thank you, Harry, the sooner the better, then," she said, with a smile that lit up her face like a sunbeam.She must see Martin, she must, she must! The old longing had come back.It was like a pain.
And being with Howard Oldershaw in that cottage he was alone, and being alone he had got back into his armor.SHE had a clean slate.
"Hurry, hurry," she said.
And when Harry hurried, as he did then, though with a curious misgiving, there were immediate results.Before Joan had chosen a hat, and for once it was difficult to make a choice, she heard his whistle and from the window of her bedroom saw him seated, hatless and sunburnt to the roots of his fair hair, in his low-lying two-seater.
It was, at his pace, a short run eastward over sandy roads, lined with stunted oaks and thick undergrowth of poison ivy, scrub and ferns; characteristic Long Island country with here a group of small untidy shacks and there a farm and outhouses with stone walls and scrap heaps, clothes drying on a line, chickens on the ceaseless hunt and a line of geese prowling aimlessly, easily set acackle,--a primitive end-of-everywhere sort of country just there, with sometimes a mile of half burned trees, whether done for a purpose or by accident it would be difficult to say.At any rate, no one seemed to care.It all had the look of No Man's Land,--unreclaimed and unreclaimable.
