On the Saturday afternoon, which was warm and summer-like, Elizabeth was watching at the window for the afternoon newspaper—the morning newspaper had not chronicled the arrival of any of the Saturday steamers. When the negro newsboy threw it on the doorway, she ran out, and in her eagerness stood bareheaded on the steps, looking for the names of the incoming steamers. She found them—all the Saturday steamers had arrived to the day, and at an early hour. And Hugh Pelham might come at any moment! The thought brought the red blood to her cheeks and a quivering smile to her lips.
She looked down the street, under an archway of green, where played a fountain in a little open space, with brilliant tulip beds. The avenue into which the street debouched was gay with carriages and autos and merry, well-dressed girls and men, tripping along by twos and threes. As she gazed toward it, a hansom clattered up and in it sat Clavering. His arrival was so sudden that he could not but note the change in Elizabeth. He had thought on his first glance that he had never seen her look so youthful and so handsome. She had in truth regained much of her lost beauty, and when she saw him and recognized him, the pallor, the shame, the repulsion, in her face were eloquent. She drew back from him involuntarily, and her greeting, although gentle, did not conceal her feelings in the least.
As usual, Clavering appeared to be in the pink of condition. The crisis through which he had lately passed, the shock of the disappointment contained in Elizabeth’s letter, his four days of hard travel, had left no mark upon him. He was a strong man in physique as well as in will. Elizabeth showed great embarrassment, but Clavering met her without the least awkwardness. As soon as they were alone in the drawing-room, cool and darkened from the too ardent sun, Clavering came to the point.
“I was, of course, astounded to receive your letter,” he said. “I was on my ranch. I had just arrived, and was sitting down to supper when the mail was brought from the post-office twenty miles away. I found if I left at once I could make the midnight train, and that would give me fast connections all the way through. So, when I had finished my supper—it took me just twenty minutes—you know a ranchman’s supper isn’t a function, so to speak—I got on horseback and rode nearly thirty miles in four hours and a half. I had been riding all day, too. So you see I’m a very determined lover. This is my first love, you know,—the first like this, I mean,—and I couldn’t afford to throw it away.”
He was smiling now. The idea that the slim woman, dressed in black, sitting before him, with the red and white coming and going in her cheeks, could seriously resist him really seemed preposterous to him. Elizabeth remained silent, and Clavering knew that silence in a woman is momentous. As she made no reply he said, after a long pause, “And how about that other man?”
Elizabeth had said no word in her letter about any one else, and started at Clavering’s words. “I—I—” She could get no farther. It was in the beginning only a shrewd surmise of Clavering’s, but Elizabeth’s faltering words and shrinking manner had confirmed it.
“I knew, of course, another man had turned up; that’s why I came post-haste,” coolly remarked Clavering. “Now tell me all about him.”
Elizabeth was forced to answer. “It is—there was—my husband’s cousin, Major Pelham.”
“Oh, yes; the fellow that persecuted you after your husband’s death. He, however, is hardly the man to interfere with me.”