"I—I think we had better go back to the others," she announced, abruptly, in a moment, and her intonation was quick and sharp, almost as if she were frightened and trying to escape from some threatened danger. "It"—she smiled uncertainly—"it's not quite good form, I think, for us to wander off like this."
"Hang good form!" said Gerard, but still he followed her back resignedly to the other room, and she gave, as they reached the lights and the people, a soft sigh of relief, which fortunately he did not hear. Yet he noticed that for the rest of the evening she was paler than she had been at first.
This pallor increased when Mrs. Bobby, too, voiced the question which had been perplexing her all the evening, as to why she did not wear the pearls. Elizabeth did not mention her moods—it is evident that women cannot be put off, in such important questions as that of jewelry, with the vague answers that might satisfy a man. She said that the string had broken, and she had sent them to town to be re-strung. Her aunts knew that they had been there for that purpose since early spring, and they could not understand why she did not send for them, since other things had been left at the same jeweler's—notably that little jeweled watch, which they had heard of, but never seen. It was odd that Elizabeth should have lost, to so large an extent, her taste for pretty things.
Gerard, too, noticed this, but he would not ask her any more questions. Later he gave her a string of emeralds set with diamonds, which she wore to entertainments in the Neighborhood that autumn, and no one asked any more questions about the pearls, since it was natural that she should prefer to wear his gift.
His trust in her was absolute, as he had said. It seemed as if he would make amends now by the plenitude of his confidence, for that former instinctive, reasonless distrust. And then she was so different from the frivolous girl he had first imagined her. Every day he reproached himself with his old estimate of her character, as he discovered in her new and unexpected depths of brain and soul. She read all the books that he recommended—some of them very deep, and she would once have thought very tiresome—and she surprised him by the intelligence of her criticisms, she took a sympathetic interest in those articles by which he was making a name for himself in the scientific world, and she entered with an apparently perfect comprehension into all his hopes, thoughts and aspirations. There was only one thing in which she baffled him, one point where her old wilfulness would come between them. This was her obstinate and unaccountable refusal to name their wedding day.
The Neighborhood was exercised on the subject. It had been decided by unanimous consent that the wedding should be in the autumn—"quite the best time for a wedding" as the Rector's wife observed, and lay awake one whole night planning the most charming (and inexpensive) decorations of autumn leaves and golden-rod. But all the reward she received for her pains was the information that Elizabeth did not care for autumn weddings, and as the Misses Van Vorst at Gerard's request, had taken a small apartment in town for the winter, the Rector's wife had many pangs at the thought that the Bassett Mills church and her husband would lose all the prestige that would attend this great event—to say nothing of the fee.
But when Gerard, as a matter of course, spoke of their being married in town, Elizabeth looked up deprecatingly into his face.
"Wait till I'm twenty-one," she pleaded. "This is my unlucky year, you know. Do please, Julian, wait till it's over."
But Gerard's face was set in rigid lines, like that of a man who is determined to stand no more trifling. Elizabeth's unlucky year would not be past till April.