She heard Hazel asking Dominick questions about Miss Cannon, and she heard Dominick’s answers, brief and given with a reticent doggedness. Then Hazel asked him for the time and she was conscious of his elbow pressing against her arm as he felt for his watch. As he drew it out and held it toward the questioner, Berny suddenly leaned forward, and, catching his hand with the watch in it, turned its face toward her. The hand beneath hers was cold, and shook. She let it go and again sank back in her chair. The feeling of sickness grew stronger and was augmented by a sense of physical feebleness, of being tremulous and cold deep down in her bones.
Hazel rose to her feet, shaking her skirts into place.
“Let’s go on,” she said, “it’s getting chilly. Come along, Josh. I suppose if you were let alone, you’d sit here till sundown listening to the music in a trance.”
Dominick and Josh rose and there was an adjusting and putting-on of wraps. Berny still sat motionless, her hands, stiff in their tight gloves, lying open on her lap.
“Come along, Berny,” said Hazel. “It’s too cold to sit here any longer. Why, how funny you look, all pale and shriveled up! You’re as bad as Josh. You and he ought to have married each other. You’d have been a prize couple.”
Josh laughed loudly at this sally, leaning round the figure of his wife to present his foolish, good-humored face, creased with a grin, to Berny.
“Are you willing, Berny?” he cried gaily. “I can get a divorce whenever you say. It will be dead easy; brutal and inhuman treatment. Just say the word!”
“There’ll be brutal and inhuman treatment if you don’t move on and stop blocking the way, Josh McCrae,” said Hazel severely. “I want to go out that side and there you are right in the path, trying to be funny.”
The cheerful Josh, still laughing, turned and moved onward between the seats, the others following him. The mass of the crowd was not yet leaving, and as the little group moved forward in a straggling line toward the drive, the exciting opening of the William Tell Overture boomed out from the sounding board. It was a favorite piece, and they left lingeringly, Hazel and Josh particularly fascinated, with heads turned and ears trained on the band. Josh’s hand, passed through his wife’s arm, affectionately pressed her against his side, for despite the sharpness of their recriminations they were the most loving of couples.
Berny was the last of the line. In the flurry of departure her silence had passed unnoticed, and that she should thus lag at the tail of the procession was not in any way remarkable, as, at the best of times, she was not much of a walker and in her high-heeled Sunday shoes her progress was always deliberate.