“Married, Jerome? A singer...?”
Her eyes were all amazement and inquiry across the dusk of the temple. But he tossed his head with a careless fling, for he was fully revived now, and even if it was difficult, circumstances being what they were, to make the announcement with real and satisfying bravado, still he wanted her to know that he, too, had had his taste of matrimony—though he didn’t mention it had only been after a fashion....
She could hardly believe the things she saw and heard; and she remembered how she had sent the ring back by Ted without a message.
The moon climbed higher, and a tiny night wind was springing. It made the tattered leaves of the palms and giant ferns shiver softly, like rain. Stella felt his aloofness, and a shy reticence came upon her tongue. She sat silent.
“I guess we’ve both changed some,” Jerome laughed coolly, assuming more lightness than he perhaps really felt. He was a little ashamed of his very romantic state of mind an hour ago.
“People couldn’t go through all we have in the past year without changing.” Her voice reached the heart with its pathetic deadness. The woman drooped and gently shook before him.
Another silence, with the sad swish of the jungle outside, under a white moon.
“Hagen’s Island,” she murmured brokenly after awhile, “is a place where you come to know yourself through and through.” And he saw still more vividly that this was not the girl he had known in his groping days of hobbledehoy. “I’ve tried to believe it would come right in the end,” she resumed in a moment, “—maybe after a long, long time. But all the while—” it faltered just a little—“all the while I’ve had a feeling I’d never see home again.” Then she looked up and spoke with a touch of hysterical brightness: “I used to sit on the rocks, Jerome, and imagine what a home-coming it would be! You don’t mind my rambling on like this, do you Jerome?”
“Of course not.” But he was privately marvelling. Stella—great Scott!—actually sighing over the thought of home, where nothing ever happened! It made him smile—oh, ever so worldly and sophisticated a smile; and he couldn’t help remembering again how she used to sail into him in her impetuous, young, rebellious way, for being so satisfied with his humdrum lot.