“Why?” Stacey asked. “Is he so anxious to be rid of you?”
But at this Marian only laughed without replying.
Stacey had of course seen Mr. and Mrs. Latimer more than once by this time. His old admiration for Marian’s father had gone, like so many other things. He found Mr. Latimer a cultivated futile gentleman with an interest in baubles and a talent for intelligent monologue. The only thing about him that awakened any interest in Stacey was a kind of irascibility that Stacey did not remember as formerly characteristic of him. Mr. Latimer was really sharp at times, in a suave polished way, with his daughter and his wife.
But Mrs. Latimer, though she had certainly aged, had clearly not done so because of such trifles; for she bore her husband’s occasional pettish outbursts with a pleasant detached tolerance. They might have been the outbursts of characters in a book she was reading, for all the effect they appeared to have on her.
She had welcomed Stacey with quiet happiness, and he had felt at once a comfort in her presence which he felt in that of no one else. Yet she had said nothing of importance to him, had talked of externals even the time or two that they had found themselves alone together for a few minutes.
He left the Latimer house rather early on the afternoon of this unsatisfactory interview with Marian. Something about Marian antagonized him strongly, even now that he was surely free; so that the impulse he felt to seek her society repeatedly in this way revealed a bond of some inexplicable sort and irked him.
He walked swiftly north till he came to the handsome park the entrance to which lay at no great distance from the Latimer home. And, plunging into the green shady paths, he felt a sudden relief. To cut loose from it all—all streets! all men! To be free! There was no joy for him in the full-leafed June beauty of the trees or in the bird songs among them,—no call to comradeship. Quite otherwise. It was solely as release that he instinctively welcomed them.
Striding aimlessly onward in this mood, Stacey suddenly heard his name called and swung about quickly to see Mrs. Latimer sitting on a bench at the edge of the path he followed and waving a green parasol at him.
“I couldn’t help calling to you,” she said pleasantly, “though I oughtn’t to. You look so splendidly alone, as though you didn’t want to see any one.”
“Oh, but yes,” he returned, “I’m glad to see you! No one else; but you!” And he sat down on her bench.