Honor gazed at him with helpless, fascinated eyes. Mrs. Kellinger noted the expression. There was evidently another secret: she had already divined one.
Soon afterward Honor went home, and Stephen did not accompany her. Adelaide noted that. She noted also that he sat longer than usual in her parlor after the early dinner, smoking cigarettes and becoming gradually more and more drowsy, until at last, newspaper in hand, he sauntered off to his own room, as if for a siesta. It was too well acted. She said to herself, with conviction, "He is going out!" A woman can deceive admirably in little things; a man can not. He can keep the secret of an assassination, but not of a clam supper. The very cat discovers it. Adelaide went to her room, put on her trim little walking-boots and English round hat, and, slipping quietly out of the house, walked down the road to a wooded knoll she remembered, a little elevation that commanded the valley and the village; here, under a tree, she sat waiting. She had a volume of Landor: it was one of Wainwright's ways to like Landor. After half an hour had passed, she heard, as she had expected to hear, footsteps; she looked up. Wainwright was passing. "Why—is it you?" she called out. "I thought you would sleep for two hours at least. Sit down here awhile and breathe this delicious air with me."
Wainwright, outwardly undisturbed, left the road, came up the knoll, and sat down by her side. Being in the shade, he took off his hat and threw himself back on the grass. But that did not make him look any larger. Only a broad-shouldered, big fellow can amount to anything when lying down in the open air: he must crush with his careless length a good wide space of grass and daisies, or he will inevitably be overcome by the preponderant weight of Nature—the fathomless sky above, the stretch of earth on each side. Wainwright took up the volume, which Adelaide did not conceal; that he had found her reading his favorite author secretly was another of the little facts with which she gemmed his life. "What do you discover to like?" he asked.
"'His bugles on the Pyrenees dissolved the trance of Europe'; and, 'When the war is over, let us sail among the islands of the Ægean and be as young as ever'; and, 'We are poor indeed when we have no half-wishes left us,'" said Adelaide, musically quoting. "Then there is the 'Artemidora.'"
"You noticed that?"
"Yes."
Meanwhile, the man was thinking, "How can I get away unsuspected?" and the woman, "How can I make him tell me?"
They talked some time longer; then Adelaide made up her mind to go into action.
Adelaide (quietly). "There is a change in you, Stephen. I want you to tell me the cause."
Stephen. "We all change as time moves on."