The captain walked slowly towards the porch, entered the kitchen without a word, and sank heavily into a chair. Caleb made no sound; he stood beside him, waiting, one hand grasping the table.
“She’s gone, ain’t she?”
The captain nodded his head.
“Gone! Who with?” asked Caleb, unconsciously repeating the words that had rung all day in his ears.
“Bill Lacey,” said the captain, with choking voice.
CHAPTER X—STRAINS FROM BOCK’S 'CELLO
Mrs. Leroy was one of the few women in town who realized what Sanford and his friends had long ago discovered,—the possibilities of New York in summer. To her it had now become its most delightful season, a season of long days and short nights—days and nights of utter idleness, great content, and blessed peace of mind; a season when one could dine where one chose without a waiting cab and a hurried departure at the bidding of somebody else; when the eleven o’clock lecturer is silent, the afternoon tea a memory, and the epidemic of the ten-course dinner a forgotten plague.
She had grown to believe with Sanford that if one could impress the possibility of these truths upon the friends one loved, so that they, and only they, could tiptoe back into their houses, keep their blinds closed and their servants hidden, and so delude the balance of the world—those they did not love, the uncongenial, the tiresome, the bumptious, and the aggressive—into believing that they had fled; if this little trick could be played on the world every June, and for three long happy months only congenial spirits could spread themselves over space and eat their lotus in peace (and with their fingers, if they so pleased), then would each one discover that New York in summer could indeed be made the Eldorado of one’s dreams.
Her own front door on Gramercy Park was never barricaded, nor was her house dismantled. She changed its dress in May and put it into charming summer attire of matting and chintz, making it a rare and refreshing retreat; and more than half her time she spent within its walls, running down to Medford whenever the cares of that establishment required attention, or a change of mood made a change of scene desirable.
Since the visit when Captain Joe had dismissed her with his thanks from the warehouse hospital at Keyport she had gone to Medford but once.