As I expected, we stopped at the door. The vacant lot was still vacant, and among its dead stalks of burdock and succory April was bringing the first shades of soft green. I thought of Lovey, of course; of our tramp round Columbus Circle; of my midnight adventure right on this spot. It was like going back to another life; it was as this life must have seemed to Lovey and his Lizzy reunited in that world where her neck was as straight as a walking-stick, and everything was lovely-like.
Cantyre spoke low, as if he could hardly speak at all.
“I asked Regina to be in. She’ll be expecting us.”
And she was. She was expecting us in that kind of agitation which hides itself under a pretense of being more than usually cool. In sympathy with Lovey’s memory, I suppose, she was dressed in black, which made a foil for her vivid lips and eyes. Out of the latter she was unable to keep a shade of feverish brightness that belied the nonchalance of her greeting.
She talked about Lovey, about the funeral, about the weather, about the declaration of war, about the men in khaki who with such surprising promptness had begun to appear in the streets. She talked rapidly, anxiously, against time, as it were, and busied herself pouring tea. Suspecting, doubtless, that Cantyre had something special to say, she was trying to fight him off from it as long as possible.
I had taken a seat; he remained standing, his back to the fire. His look was abstracted, thundery, morose.
Right in the middle of what Regina was saying about the seizure of the German ships he dropped with the remark, “You two know what Lovey told me—what he’s been telling me ever since you both came home.”
Neither of us had a word to say. We could only stare. You could hear the mantelpiece clock ticking before he went on again.
“Well, I’m not going to give you up, Regina,” he declared, aggressively, then.
One of her hands was on the handle of the teapot; one was in the act of taking up a cup. If coloring was ever transmuted into flame, her coloring was at that moment. There was a dramatic intensity in her quietness.