Mr. Jonas turned the wheel. “Only yours?” he rejoined briskly.
The minister, on the sidewalk now, looked up at him dazedly. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
“Not yet,” returned Mr. Jonas, with cheerful reassurance; “you will, you will, though.”
So again Alexina made plans. They would go on the eighth as before, she and Celeste and Molly, but they would go to Cannes Brulée.
Supper was over and the Captain sat smoking in his cane chair on the gallery. If King was coming, it would be to-night; the train from the South came in at seven, and he knew that they were going.
Alexina, sitting on the steps below him, was glad it was the Captain out here with her, rather than the others. It was like the quiet and cover of twilight, the silence of the Captain. Moving a little, she put a hand upon the arm of his chair. His closed upon it and his eyes rested on her young, beautiful profile, though she did not know it.
The moon came up. The clock in the hall struck eight. Molly was lying on the sofa inside, Mrs. Leroy moving about as was her wont, straightening after the servants had gone, and innocently unsystematizing what little system they employed.
Outside sat the man and the girl. There were night calls from birds and insects, but beyond these sounds the girl’s heart listening, heard—
Between where the road emerged from the hummock and the gate to Nancy was a stretch of old corduroy road over a marshy strip. Elsewhere a horse’s hoofs sank into sand. Willy Leroy would ride out, if he came, probably on Mr. Jonas’s mare.
The girl sat, all else abeyant, listening. She heard the first hoof-beat, the first clattering thud on wood. Her hand slipped from the Captain’s; she sat still.