Hollister resumed his business. He went and came every day in the train or boat.
Claire did not feel at all like a bride. But she and her husband had talked together about their future, and she had the sense of a great, vital, prosperous change. She felt like a wife.
XIII.
A long chain of days followed, each in every way like the other. One steady yet lazy wind pulsed from the south; the skies were clad with an unaltering blue haze from dawn till dark, except that a rosy flush, like a kind of languid aurora, would steal into the full round of the horizon with each new sunset, and stay until evening had first empurpled it, then darkened it completely. Afterward the stars would come forth, golden, globular, and rayless, while the same unchanged southerly wind would get a damp sharpness that made at least a light wrap needful if one remained out of doors. The great piazza would be almost vacant an hour or so after nightfall, and the whole shore quite lonely. As regarded all after-dark visitors, the island had virtually closed its season. But Claire and Hollister haunted the piazza a good deal when the early autumnal darkness had emptied it of occupants. After they had dined he would light his cigar, and then select a certain hundred yards or so of the firm wooden flooring, over which they passed and repassed, arm-in-arm, more times than perhaps both their healthful young frames realized. The other guests of the hotel doubtless conjectured that they were saying all sorts of tender trifles to each other, according to the immemorial mode of those from whom the honeymoon has not yet withdrawn her witching spells. But in reality there was very little between them of what we term lover-like discourse. Claire discouraged it in her husband, who obeyed the tacit mandate.
She was prosaic and practical on these occasions. It amused and charmed Hollister to find her so. In any guise that it chose to wear, her personality was an enchantment. Claire planned just how they were to live on their return to town, and he thought her irresistible in this rôle of domestic anticipation.
"We shall have to find apartments," she told him. "We cannot afford to rent a house of our own. But apartments are very nice and respectable. They are quite different from a boarding-house, you know. I should be very sorry if we were compelled to board."
"So should I," declared Hollister. "Are you sure that we have not enough to let us rent a small house?"
Claire's eyes glistened, as though the chance of their income being made to stretch thus far suggested charming possibilities. But she soon gave a sad shake of the head. "No," she decided. "We should only find ourselves running into debt. We had better take no rash risks. Your business is full of them, as it is, Herbert. Besides, a year or two may make the change easy for us."
She amazed him by the speed with which she learned just how his affairs stood. Her quick mastery of facts that with most women baffle both memory and understanding, was no less rare than thorough. It had always been thus with her. Whatever she wanted to comprehend became her mental possession after slight and brief effort. It was not long before she read the price-list of stocks in the morning papers with nearly as lucid a perception of just what it meant as Hollister himself. She made her husband explain as well as he could—and this was by no means ill,—both the theory and practice of Wall Street speculation. She soon began to know all his important investments, and talk of them with facile glibness.