“Dade’s here.”
She was pleased when he frowned his jealous disapproval.
“How long’s she going to stay?” he said bluntly.
“Not long,” she replied. “She won’t stay when she knows you’re here. Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”
“I didn’t know it myself,” he said. “I came on a telegram from Rankin, and I ought to go right out again, only—I had to stay and see you.”
She purred an instant in the embrace into which he drew her and then quickly hushed him by pointing toward the drawing-room.
Garwood had never known Dade Emerson, though he had heard of her from Emily in those confidences with which they tried to atone for the years that had passed before love came to them, by recounting in detail, little by little, all their happenings and relations. Dade, to be sure, had impulsively declared that she remembered Garwood as a shock-headed boy whose short trousers came abjectly below his knees, and had identified him to Emily as the youth who had thrown a stone and hooted them as they were going homeward one day from the Misses Lewis’s school. Emily had gleefully told this to Garwood and though he had recognized the picture’s truth, he was ashamed of it, and had denied it altogether.
When they entered the drawing-room, and Emily had presented Garwood, there was an instant’s constraint, born of Garwood’s uneasiness in women’s society, an uneasiness he somehow contrived to make pass for a Byronic contempt of it, to which also contributed Emily’s solicitude that her lover should meet the approval of her friend.
Dade sat listlessly twirling a ring on her strong, white finger, a silver ring of curious, antique workmanship that helped the foreign effect she sought in her personality, but when, through her lashes she saw Emily gazing at Garwood with a sudden access of fondness, she rather coldly said:
“You ah standing for the borough, I believe, ah you not, Mistah Gahwood?”