Catherine rose. She seemed quite her calm self again. She even smiled. And there was only a slight unsteadiness in her voice when she spoke.
“Oh, no, it isn’t, Stacey!” she said. “You don’t want to stay to dinner with us, but you’re going to, all the same.”
He laughed. “All right,” he assented.
CHAPTER II
“I wish,” thought Stacey nervously, when, on the afternoon of the next day but one, his train, slowing down, was passing through the suburbs of Vernon, “I wish that old things would either die outright or else live.”
For there in the distance crept by, on its hill, the Endicott School, where he had gone as a boy; here was a sudden glimpse of the Drive, where he had often motored with Marian. And old emotions stirred feebly within him like ghosts of their dead selves. He did not want them; they annoyed him. They had nothing to do with Stacey Carroll, 1919. They made him conscious of himself, that he had a self.
They were worse than anything he felt at sight of the small crowd which awaited him as the train swept into the station. Amusement submerged all other feelings then.
“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, “the conquering hero!”—and plunged down into the tumult.
There was his father, his face rigid with repressed emotion, his hand shaking Stacey’s vigorously. And there were half a dozen of his old friends standing back to let the family have free play. And here was his sister, Julie, fatter than in 1914, laughing and crying and kissing him and trying to talk all at once, while her pleasant-faced husband, Jimmy Prout, smilingly held out a hand across her shoulder and managed to grasp one of Stacey’s fingers.
Did they really care so much as all this for him? Stacey wondered, with remorse at feeling so little himself. Or was it just the dramatic moment?