But Barker was on hand promptly with the smart little car which consumed such an incredible amount of gasolene, and the air of the soft spring twilight was infinitely grateful after the smoke and stuffiness of the train. As they drove swiftly past the rolling lawns of one spacious landscape garden after another, each burgeoning with its colorful promise of the blossoming year, his taut nerves relaxed, and he settled back in contented ease. What if he had been unlucky in past speculations, if old Foulkes did consider him an unstable weakling? Leila believed in him, and she was his, all his!
The glimmer of white upon the veranda half-hidden in the trees resolved itself into a slender, fairy-like figure, and as he alighted from the car and mounted the steps she caught his hands in the eager, childish way which was one of her chief charms.
“Oh, Norman, how late you are! Poor dear, did they keep him at that wretched old office and make him miss his golf?” She lifted her face for his evening kiss, and her soft, blue eyes glowed with a deep, warm light. “George is here; I mean, he ’phoned from the Millards’. He’s coming over for dinner.”
“That’s the reason for the début of the new white gown, eh?” Storm laughed. “By Jove, I believe I ought to be jealous of old George! When a man’s wife and his best friend——”
“Don’t!” There was a quick note almost of distress in Leila’s tones. “I don’t like to hear you joke that way about him, dear. He seems so lonely, standing just outside of life, somehow. He hasn’t anything of this!”
She waved her little hands in a comprehensive gesture as if to take in the whole atmosphere of the home, and her husband laughed carelessly once more.
“It’s his own fault, then. Don’t waste any sympathy on him on that score, Leila. George is a confirmed old bachelor; he would run a mile from a suggestion of domesticity.” At the door he turned. “Oh, I say dear——”
But Leila was already down the steps and had started across the lawn, at the farther side of which Storm discerned a short stout commonplace figure approaching; and turning once more he hastened to his room to change.
George Holworthy, two years his senior, had been a classmate of Storm’s at the university twenty years before, and the companionship—rather a habit of association than a friendship—which had grown up between the undisciplined, high-spirited boy and his duller, more phlegmatic comrade had proved a lasting one despite the wide dissimilarity in their natures. Storm was too fastidious, Holworthy too seriously inclined, for dissipation to have attracted either of them, but while the former had drifted, plunging recklessly from one speculation to another, the latter had plodded slowly, steadily ahead until at forty-two he had amassed a comfortable fortune and attained a position of established recognition among his business associates.
An hour later, as they sat drinking their after-dinner coffee on the veranda, Leila’s words returned to his mind, and Storm found himself eying his guest in half-disparaging appraisal. Good, stupid old George! How stodgy and middle-aged he was getting to be! His hair was noticeably thin on top and peppered with gray and he looked like anything but an assured, successful man of affairs as he lounged, round-shouldered, in his chair, his mild eyes blinking nearsightedly at Leila, who sat on the veranda steps cradling one chiffon clad knee between her clasped hands.