He stood for a moment, catching his breath. The city had grown around and away from it; streets had multiplied, bristling with the ugliest varieties of modern architecture; but South Park, stately, dark, solemn, had not changed by so much as a lighter coat of paint. His eyes moved swiftly to the Randolph house. Its shutters were closed. The dust of summer was thick upon them. He stood for fully five minutes staring at it, regardless of curious eyes. Something awoke and hungered within him.
“My vanished youth, I suppose,” he thought sadly. “I certainly have no wish to see her, poor thing! But she was very sweet.”
He walked slowly round the crescent on the left, and rang the bell at Mrs. McLane’s door. As the butler admitted him he noted with relief that the house had been refurnished. A buzz of voices came from the parlour. The man lifted a portière, and Mrs. McLane, with an exclamation of delight, came forward, with both hands outstretched. Her face was unchanged, but she would powder her hair no more. It was white.
“Thorpe!” she exclaimed. “It is not possible? How long have you been here? A week! Mon Dieu! And you come only now! But I suppose I am fortunate to be remembered at all.”
Thorpe assured her that she had been in his thoughts since the hour of his arrival, but that he wished to be free of the ugly worries of business before venturing into her distracting presence.
“I don’t forgive you, although I give you a dinner on Thursday. Will that suit you? Poor little Mrs. Harold! We have all been attention itself to her for your sake. Come here and sit by me; but you may speak to your other old friends.”
Two of the “Macs” were there; the other was dead, he was told later. Both were married, and one was dressed with the splendours of Paris. Mrs. Earle was as little changed as Mrs. McLane, and her still flashing eyes challenged him at once. Guadalupe Hathaway was unmarried and had grown stout; but she was as handsome as of old.
They all received him with flattering warmth, “treated him much better than he deserved,” Mrs. McLane remarked, “considering he had never written one of them a line;” and he felt the past growing sharp of outline. There were several very smart young ladies present, two of whom he remembered as awkward little girls. The very names of the others were unknown to him. They knew of him, however, and one of them affected to disapprove of him sharply because he had “fought against the flag.” Mrs. McLane took up the cudgels for her South, and party feeling ran high.
Nina Randolph’s name was not mentioned. He wondered if she were dead. Not so much as a glance was directed toward the most momentous episode of his life. Doubtless they had forgotten that he had once been somewhat attentive to her. But his memory was breaking in the middle and marshalling its forces at the farther end; the events of the intervening ten years were now a confused mass of shadows. Mrs. Earle sang a Mexican love-song, and he turned the leaves for her. When he told Guadalupe Hathaway that he was glad to find her unchanged, she replied:—
“I am fat, and you know it. And as I don’t mind in the least, you need not fib about it. You have a few grey hairs and lines; but you’ve worn better than our men, who are burnt out with trade winds and money grubbing.”