The evening before had been the climax of his empty successes. It had been Boston's first oratorio of the season, and the wreath had been an unusually ponderous one. It had met him promptly at the end of his first number, and it had impressed him as a curious bit of irony, following as it did upon the closing phrases of Spe modo Vivitur. Were his crowns to be only the thornless, characterless ones that went with his profession? He bowed low, nevertheless, before the storm of applause, set up his trophy against the steadiest of the music racks of the second violins, and lost himself so completely in wondering how Lorimer was holding out without him that he went through his part in the quartette, three numbers later, in perfect unconsciousness of the hostile glances which the soprano had been casting at him during the Est tibi Laurea. Her flowers had been carnations, and only two dozen of them, at that.
The next afternoon, Thayer found himself in the familiar room, with Beatrix's hand in his own.
"Only ten weeks, measured by time," he answered her greeting; "but it seems half a decade since we were killing time on the beach at Monomoy."
"Killing crabs, you would better say," she returned, with a smile. "I think you and Sidney must have exterminated the race for all time."
"Can you destroy the future for a race that habitually goes backwards?" he questioned, with a boyish gayety which she had never seen in him before. "How is Lorimer?"
No one else but Thayer would have noted the slight hesitation that punctuated her reply.
"He is—well."
Thayer's momentary gayety left him, and he glanced at her sharply.
"And you?" he asked.
"I am always in rude health, just now the better for having you invade my loneliness. Do you still take only one lump?" Her tone was perfectly noncommittal.