Would the time never go? Was Ally never coming?
She rose before lunch could possibly be ready, and dressed herself. Then she wandered into the central room that served for drawing-room and lounge, and from which the others all opened out. She found Ally’s cigarettes on a table and smoked one, turning over the pages of last month’s magazines, which had just come in by the mail. The smudgy illustrations annoyed her, and she flung them by and rose restlessly, wandering about the hot, sweet rooms, and listening for his step through the glare outside.
Still he did not come. It was past the luncheon hour now, and Abdallah had put the finishing touches to the table and stood by in grave reproach, his snowy turban already on, and his hands folded over his tunic. Abdallah was always severely white at luncheon, his costume consisting merely of a tunic and turban; but by dinner-time he had added a coloured bandana and an embroidered jacket. His motionless presence added the last irritation to her overwrought mood, and she sent him away until Captain Lewin should appear.
The hours dragged away, until the morning had slipped into afternoon. Still he did not come. With a feeling that she wanted to shriek hysterically, Leoline paced steadily up and down the broad floors of the bungalow, from one shaded room into another, and so back to the corner where the table was still spread. She could not eat, and she felt that Ally might come at any moment. Something was keeping him—not his own pleasure this time; his being transferred from Key Island was a weighty matter even to him, and she knew he would return to her for advice and support as soon as he could. He could see his own interest sufficiently in this to resist a passing temptation, but there was none to keep him at Government House. The horrible part was that it might be nothing but trivial duties that detained him after all, and they might have to go through this suspense again. The heat seemed to get no less as the day wore towards four o’clock, and her limbs began to feel lifeless and heavy, as if paralysed. When at last the door opened and he walked quietly in, she did not rise to meet him or spring up for a minute. She sat there watching him come straight towards her with a curious speculative feeling that there was a grave importance in his manner that seemed a little ridiculous. She criticised him as if he were somebody not belonging to her.
“Well!” she said rising at last, in a slow mechanical fashion. She looked at him all across the room. Yes, certainly he was so grave as to be unlike himself—not depressed, but self-sufficient, almost pompous. It was so foreign to any mood in which she had seen Alaric before that she could only stare at him.
He sat down heavily in a basket chair that creaked beneath his weight, and so added to her absurd impression that he was assuming the air of an elderly and important personage. He did not speak either at once, and when he did he seemed to be weighing his words, as if he said a solemn thing.
“I have got it!”
“The appointment?” she said with a long breath, trying to shake off her own leadenness and the effect of his strange manner. “Oh, Ally, what good news! I have been so frightened—when you did not come, you know,—I thought we might still have to wait.”
“He spoke of it almost at once. We have talked of little else. He was giving me minute instructions.”
A blank feeling of non-comprehension seemed to take possession of her. He was still unlike himself, or else Gregory’s earnestness had impressed him at last. Perhaps the force of the stronger man had been let loose on the weaker for once, for the sake of urging him to a more serious sense of his position. She knew that Gregory had been impatient of his indifference in his present post; perhaps he had told him plainly that he must be more conscientious with Sir Geoffrey Vaughan.