“A thousand times true!” she said, and, in her helpless rage, began to weep. “But I hate you worse than that!”
“And you sent me away because I couldn’t make you feel anything!” he cried. “Lily, when will you marry me?”
“Do you think I’d ever be engaged to you again,” she sobbed, “when you believed I’d do a brutal thing like that on purpose?”
“Lily,” he said again, “when will you marry me?”
“Never,” she answered. “I’ll never marry anybody.” But even as she spoke, the fortunate young man’s shoulder was becoming damper with her tears.
XXIX
MRS. CROMWELL’S OLDEST DAUGHTER
ALL OF the players except three had returned to the clubhouse before the close of the fine April afternoon, and, after an interval in the locker rooms, had departed either in their cars or strolling away on foot, homeward bound to the pleasant groups of suburban houses east of the country club. Westward lay the links, between ploughed fields and groves of beech and ash and maple, a spacious park of rolling meadows with a far boundary of woodland, and, beyond that, nothing but a smoky sunset. All was quiet; there were no sounds from within the clubhouse, nor came any from the links; and although no kine wound slowly o’er the lea and no ploughman plodded his weary way, the impending twilight in such a peace might well have stirred a poetic observer to murmurous quotation from the Elegy. Nevertheless, in this sweet evening silence, emotion was present and not peaceful.
There was emotion far out upon the links, and there was more upon the western veranda of the clubhouse where two ladies sat, not speaking, but gazing intently toward where the dim and hazy great sun was immersing itself in the smoke of the horizon. These two emotional ladies were sisters; that was obvious, for they shared a type of young matronly fairness so decidedly that a photograph of one might have been mistaken, at first glance, for that of the other.
A student of families, observing them, would have guessed immediately that their mother was a fair woman, probably still comely with robust good health, and of no inconsiderable weight in body as well as in general prestige. The two daughters were large young women, but graceful still; not so large as they were going to be some day, nor less well-favoured than they had been in their slenderer girlhood. They were alike, also, in the affluence displayed by the sober modishness of what they wore; and other tokens of this affluence appeared upon the club driveway, where waited two shining, black, closed cars, each with a trim and speechless driver unenclosed. The sisters were again alike in the expectancy with which they gazed out upon the broad avenue of the golf links; but there was a difference in their expressions;—for the expectancy of the younger one was a frowning expectancy, an indignant expectancy, while the expectancy of the other, who was only a year or two the older, appeared to be a timid and apprehensive expectancy—an expectancy, in fact, of calamity.