A smart little car darted up and stopped, and out of it came Elsa with a boyish bound, which had about it, however, a certain trim and self-sufficient grace. Stella drew her hand gently out of Jerome’s warm clasp, and they rose to welcome the newcomer.
There was a very faint and echoy trace of the old romantic flutter in Stella’s voice as she suggested they go into the parlour. But Elsa, in her cool, blunt, even subtly tactless way, would not hear of it. “I like it much better outside, and anyway I can only stop a minute. I’m picking up dad at the club.”
She gazed at Jerome, just an instant, somewhat queerly; and then she gazed at them both without any expression at all. Her heart was not without its emotion—but emotion so jealously guarded that no one on earth could possibly hope to obtain the slightest clue to it.
She sat down with them on the steps and talked of trivial things. Jerome was unexpectedly silent. Finally she turned to him, drawling:
“You’re getting to be an awful stranger over our way. I suppose the journey scares you out.”
And before he could make any reply at all, she had turned calmly back to Stella with unrelated matters, her tone just a shade too eager, perhaps, to be quite worthy of the established Utterbourne imperturbability.
When she was gone, Stella mused: “Elsa never changes. She’s always just the same.” And then, on an undercurrent of dark brooding: “It must be wonderful to be able to go through life that way,” the woman tensely murmured.
“I suppose so,” replied Jerome, not quite at his ease still, but behaving more normally now the other girl had departed.
Stella almost surrendered, right on the spot, to a throbbing impulse to ask him: “What is Elsa to you, and what are you to her?” But she merely sat silent; and in a way perhaps more convincing than any words, the unformed query was answered, after a moment or two, by Jerome’s gently seeking her hand again.
“Jerome....” she faltered, but her look was growing almost radiant.