“Thank you,” said Maxwell. “That is a compliment!”
After the dishes were done there were the ferns to be unboxed and admired, and it was after midnight when at last the two young men said, “Good night,” and drove away, each with the hearty assurance that he had had a wonderful time and wanted to come again soon.
When Cornelia went up to her room and took off her apron, out of its pocket fell a letter which she had received that morning and had been too busy to read. She opened it now. It was a brief, rattling epistle from one of her classmates in college, begging her to put off everything else for a few days and come to a house-party with them all. It was to be down at Atlantic City, near enough to home not to make the trip expensive; and they all were crazy to see her again and tell her all about commencement. She smiled reminiscently as she laid it away in her desk-drawer, and found to her surprise that she had no great desire to go. She knew what the party would be, full of rollicking fun, and care-free every minute of it; but somehow her heart and soul were now in her home and the new life that was opening before her. She wanted to finish the house; to make the white kitchen as charming in its way as the other rooms were getting to be; to help Carey plan a front porch he had said he would build with stone pillars; to set out some plants in the yard, finish the bedrooms, and make out a list of new furniture for the carpenter next door to buy. The minister had said he knew of some people who were refurnishing their house and wanted her professional advice. She wanted to stay and work. Mr. Maxwell was coming to take them all motoring some evening, too; and Brand had declared he would bring his sister around to call, and they would go out to ride. Life was opening up full and beautiful. College and its days seemed far away and almost childish. Tomorrow morning she and Grace Kendall were going to make curtains for one of the Sunday-school classrooms. Carey had promised to help put them up. Oh, life wasn’t half bad! Even Clytie Amabel Dodd did not loom so formidable as earlier in the evening. She knelt and thanked God.
CHAPTER XXI
When Maxwell finally turned his car cityward it was with the feeling of a naughty boy who had run away from duty and was suddenly confronted by retribution.
He glanced at the clock in the car and noted that the hour was getting very late, and compunction seized upon him. Now that he had done the thing it suddenly seemed atrocious. He had ignored a lady in trouble and gone on a tangent. It wasn’t even the excuse of a previous engagement, or the plea of old friends. It was utterly unnecessary. He had followed an impulse and accepted an utter stranger’s invitation to dinner, and then had stayed all the evening, and gone back to wash dishes afterward. As he thought it over he felt that either he was crazy or a coward. Was it actually true that he, a man full grown, with a will of his own, was afraid to trust himself for an hour in the company of the woman who had once been supreme in his life? What was he afraid of? Not that he would yield to her wiles after two years absence; not that he would break his promise to himself and marry her in spite of husbands and laws either moral or judicial. It must be that he was afraid to have his own calm disturbed. He had been through seas of agony and reached a haven of peace where he could endure and even enjoy life, and he was so selfish that he wished to remain within that haven even though it meant a breach of courtesy, and an outraging of all his finer instincts.
He forgot that his struggle earlier in the evening had been in an exactly opposite line, and that the finer feelings had urged him to remain away from the woman who had once been almost his undoing. However, now that it was almost too late to mend the matter he felt that he ought to have gone. Even if her plea of asking his advice had merely been a trumped-up excuse to bring him to her side, yet was it not the part of a gentleman to go? A true gentleman should never let a lady ask for help in vain. And he had promised always to be her friend. It might be that it had been an ill-advised promise, but a promise was a promise, etc.
By that time he had arrived at his apartment and was hastening through a rapid evening toilet. The evening and its simple experiences seemed like a pleasant dream that waking obliterates. It might return later, but now the present was upon him, and he knew Evadne when she was kept waiting. If she had not changed there was no pleasant interview in store for him. However, he need not tell her that he had been enjoying himself all the evening and had forgotten how fast time was flying.
Arrived at the hotel he went at once to the desk and asked for the lady. The clerk asked his name and called a bell-boy. “Go page Miss Chantry,” he said. “She’s in the ballroom.” Then turning to Maxwell, he said: “She left word you were to wait for her in the reception room over there.”
“No, don’t page her,” said Maxwell sharply, “I’ll go and find her myself.”