“No, Petra! I can’t go off and leave you. You must come with me. Now. You needn’t work. But I’m not going to leave you to Clare. We can talk in the car.”
But Petra misunderstood the reason for his insistence. She had suddenly remembered that Janet wouldn’t be in the office. The night she had passed had blurred her memory of ordinary things. But now she took hold of ordinary things again, even steadied herself by their cognizance. She was young, strong, and no shirker.
“Oh, of course, I must come. I had forgotten Janet wasn’t coming. Truly I had. Will you wait while I change? I saw your car outside. We’ll still be in time. It is still early.”
Lewis went out to wait in the car. He would not think. There was not one single thing that ordinary conjecture could do for him. Petra must confide in him before he would ever be able to think one straight thought again. In an amazingly short time she came running out, pulling on a polo coat over one of her office dresses. She waited till she was in the car beside him to put on her felt hat. Petra’s hats and coats, Lewis had noticed gradually, as the summer wore on, had nothing of the magic and unique loveliness of her frocks. They were merely concealing and casual. In fact, this same violet-colored felt, with its moderately wide and down-tilting brim, had sufficed her all summer in town, and this polo coat was the only coat he had ever seen her wear.
“I’m sorry that I had to keep you waiting.” She said it in her ordinary ingenuous and clear, clipped tones as he started his engine.
That she was not wavering in her good manners, that not so much as her voice was nicked by the night’s experience (whatever it had been!), brought all Lewis’ anger sweeping back. What was she made of! She might play this game with Clare, years on end, if she liked,—this game of good manners covering a secret, vital, beating heart. But she could not play it with Lewis himself any longer. They were to understand each other now. He felt capable of wrenching Petra’s secret from her heart with the strength of his bare hands. Her reticence—it should go down. He would destroy it. Never in his life had he been more exasperated.
Then they came to the one sharp turn in Clare’s beloved little country road, and Lewis’ violent feelings almost ended in a violent smash; for a stalled roadster was there, taking up the middle of the way. Only by a superhuman pulling of his whole steering gear to one side, then steadying the bounding car among threatening tree boles and so somehow getting it back to the road, did Lewis avoid calamity. Back, safe in the road, Lewis pressed his accelerator and sped on without a backward glance or even a curse at the driver of the stalled car. Lewis had seen the man well enough in that split second when he jammed on the brakes and turned the wheel. It was Neil McCloud, on his knees, struggling to get a tire either on or off one of the wheels of his gaudy roadster. Neil McCloud, on the almost unused road to Green Doors, not fifteen minutes after Petra had appeared from her mysterious night away from home! If the tire had not punctured, Neil could have been a quarter of the way back to Boston by this time. And he would have been. Certainly he had not meant Lewis and Petra to pass him.
Lewis shut his lips and waited for Petra to speak. If she would only exclaim, “Wasn’t that Neil?” Or “Why didn’t you stop? That man needed help!” Or she might say, “Whatever is Neil McCloud doing out here so early!” Yes, Petra might say practically any inane thing at this minute, and Lewis, God help him, would have believed it ingenuous. It was her saying nothing that was so blasting....
They had rushed on for almost a full minute’s damning silence before Lewis gave up his desperate hope that Petra would say some innocent word and looked at her. Her face under the rakish, slouched felt hat was utterly colorless, but her eyes were swimmingly bright. Lewis could see that. And even as he looked, although she did not turn her face or give the slightest voluntary sign that she was conscious of his regard, her pallor vanished. Fire kindled on her cheeks.
Now Lewis knew why he had been so bitterly angry all these minutes since Petra’s safe return, with her hair brushed to glisteningness, and a violet ribbon binding her curls. Intuition had outleapt conjecture. Even before Petra had spoken a word, while she had stood, an angel, against the bright gold plaque of the October sunlight filling the doorway, Lewis had known that he hated her beyond reason, that he loved her beyond reason—more than he had ever loved her before,—and that she was not his.