Silence again for one entire square and part of another. Then she said, "How did you know it was our house?"
He laid hold of his courage and told the truth. "I met your father a block or two down the avenue and I was hoping I might come upon the place where you lived. I found it. You were on the veranda, tying up the new shoots of a climbing rose."
"My 'Marechal Niel,'" she said. "It is dead now; they let it freeze last winter."
He held his peace for a time, but the rejoinder strove for speech, and had it, finally.
"The memory of it lives," he said. "I shall always see you as I saw you that morning, whatever comes between. You had on some sort of a dress that reminded me of the old Greek draperies, and you were standing on the arm of a big chair."
They were at the gate, and she let him open it for her. Bartrow and Myra were waiting for them at the veranda step. He realized that the ground was no longer safe, and would have taken his leave at the door. But Dick protested vigorously.
"No, you don't—drop out again like a ship in a fog. We've been laying for you, Uncle Steve and I, ever since you absconded last summer, and you don't get away this time without taking your medicine. Run him in there, Connie, and hang on to him while I go get my slippers and a cigar."
"There" was the cozy library, with a soft-coal fire burning cheerily in the grate, and the book-lined walls inviting enough to beckon any homeless one. But Jeffard was far beyond any outreaching of encompassments inviting or repellent. Constance drew up a chair for him before the fire, but he stood at the back of it and looked down upon her.
"Miss Elliott, there is something that I should like to tell you about—if it is far enough in the past," he said, when they were alone.