She looked down a moment, and Dick had an impression that she was holding back tears. At any rate, when she lifted her head again, her face wore a cold little stare that he had never seen before, and that seemed to hold him at arm’s length.
“I’m quite alone with the people I have to live among,” she said. “I’m not like them, and I don’t care for them.”
“Am I one of your kind?” Dick asked. He reviled himself the next moment for having said so much, but Lena seemed to draw no inferences, though her color heightened a little as she answered:
“Oh, you! There’s only one of you, unfortunately. You are a little oasis in my desert. I’m very grateful for you, but—”
Lena had said such things before. Dick began to revolve plans for a larger kindness, and, in his slow masculine intellect, fancied that it was all his own idea to try and bring this small person into contact with those who would appreciate her and with whom she could be happy,—for of course Lena herself was quite submissive to her lot.
To Dick’s friends this long summer dawdled itself away much as the previous one had done. There were the same week-ends at the lake, with Dick more full of vivacity than ever, Ellery growing more certain of himself, Madeline rounding slowly out of girlhood into womanhood. Yet there was a difference. Half a dozen Sundays, when Percival was too busy, Ellery, half-irritated with his friend, half-exultant in his desertion, spent the quiet afternoons à deux with Madeline.
It seemed to Norris that some indefinable change was coming over Dick. At times he was vivid, even fantastic, and again he lapsed into erratic silences out of which he came at new and unexpected points. He developed ideas that appeared to his friend not quite in keeping with the sterling Dick of old. He was less sensitive, so thought Ellery, in his code of honor as he saw more and more of the crooked ways of men. Once Norris met him walking with one of the cheaper aldermen, and he wore a duplicate—in gilt—of the alderman’s walk and swagger. He talked politics and reform, but with less emphasis on his ideals and more on the game, which seemed to mean the fun of catching the rascals red-handed and turning them out.
Madeline, as Ellery studied her, was unaware of any change either in Dick himself or in his attitude toward her. It was like her to be above suspicions or small jealousies.
So summer slipped into October, and there came a month of lovely days. Winter, after a feint, slunk into hiding again, and the only result of his excursion was a more splendid red on the maples, a more glowing russet on the oaks. Indian summer reigned in his stead, flinging broadcast her gorgeous colors and her melting mellowness. That men might not surfeit of her sweets, she tempered her daytime prodigality of heat by nights of frost. People were coming back to town, a few, very few, in velvet gowns, but mostly in rags and anxious about their autumn wardrobes; and yet these were days to make one long, as one does in spring, for the smell of the good brown earth and the sniff of untainted country air. The atmosphere was full of glowing warmth that penetrated to the heart and made every face on the street reflect some of its delight; for autumn with her thousand charms and witcheries was proving that she died, not from gray old age, but in the fullness of her prime.
Madeline Elton, therefore, wished herself back again with the fallen maple leaves and the pines that held their own; and Mrs. Lenox was fitting temptation to desire as the two hobnobbed over cups of tea in easy friendliness. When Dick Percival appeared, Mrs. Lenox saw the way to make her bait irresistible.