"Thank you, Harry, the sooner the better, then," she said, with a smile that lit up her face like a sunbeam. She must see Martin, she must, she must! The old longing had come back. It was like a pain. And being with Howard Oldershaw in that cottage he was alone, and being alone he had got back into his armor. SHE had a clean slate.
"Hurry, hurry," she said.
And when Harry hurried, as he did then, though with a curious misgiving, there were immediate results. Before Joan had chosen a hat, and for once it was difficult to make a choice, she heard his whistle and from the window of her bedroom saw him seated, hatless and sunburnt to the roots of his fair hair, in his low-lying two-seater.
It was, at his pace, a short run eastward over sandy roads, lined with stunted oaks and thick undergrowth of poison ivy, scrub and ferns; characteristic Long Island country with here a group of small untidy shacks and there a farm and outhouses with stone walls and scrap heaps, clothes drying on a line, chickens on the ceaseless hunt and a line of geese prowling aimlessly, easily set acackle,—a primitive end-of-everywhere sort of country just there, with sometimes a mile of half burned trees, whether done for a purpose or by accident it would be difficult to say. At any rate, no one seemed to care. It all had the look of No Man's Land,—unreclaimed and unreclaimable.
For a little while nothing was said. Out of a clear sky the sun beat down upon the car and the brown sand of the narrow road. Many times the boy shot sidelong glances at the silent girl beside him, burning to ask questions about this husband who was never mentioned and who appeared to him to be something of a myth and a mystery. He didn't love Joan, because it had been mutually agreed that he shouldn't. But he held her in the sort of devoted affection which, when it exists between a boy and a girl, is very good and rare and even beautiful and puts them close to the angels.
Presently, catching one of these deeply concerned glances, she put her little shoulder against his shoulder in a sisterly way. "Go on, then, Harry," she said. "Ask me about it. I know you want to know."
And he did. Somehow he felt that he ought to know, that he had the right. After all he had stopped himself from loving her at her urgent request, and their friendship was the best thing that he had ever known. And he began with, "When did you do it?"
"Away back in history," she said, "or so it seems. It's really only a few months."
"A few months! But you can hardly have been with him any time."
"I have never really been with him," she said. She wanted him to know everything. Now that the wound was open again and Martin in possession of her once more, she felt that she must talk about it all to some one, and who could be better than Harry, who was so like a brother?