There was nothing indefinite about Bingham, thought poor Brower; there was no doubt as to where he would continue to exist. "You mean to say it isn't decided yet where they are going to live?" Brewer's inquiry was prompted by civility rather than by interest. It was the first observation of any length that he had made for some time. Jane, who had been straining her ears during the last ten minutes for the mere sound of his voice, leaned back in her chair with an approximate comfort.
"I don't know, just exactly," replied Marshall, rather dismally. His tone made him say that he did not know at all. "I've talked with Rosy and I've talked with Arthur…." He lapsed into a comfortless silence, and ran his thin old hand over his blanched and furrowed forehead.
"When are they going to be married?" asked Brower. His eyes were on the bay-window, through whose curtains there showed the face of Bingham, his own look anxiously fixed on Marshall.
Jane caught indistinctly the muffled tone of these few syllables. She made them mean a dozen different things and finally nothing at all, but she was glad of the opportunity to do even that.
"In a month," answered Marshall; "early in October. Rosy lays great stress on an October wedding—that's the only right sort, it seems." He sighed with a full sense of the imminence of the inevitable. The voice of Bingham came with a slow, deep gravity from the bay-window, and Jane's voice, responding, mingled nervously with her father's sigh.
"Not from the new house?" said Brower.
"Hardly. It will be almost finished, but far from furnished. Perhaps they will have their receptions there, if they decide to—to come back."
"Come back?" Brower spoke up loudly; a jangling freight train had paused opposite, and the locomotive was blowing off steam.
"To America," the old man explained. He laid his hands to his temples.
"Do you sleep well?"
"Always."