The two were facing each other dangerously—June flushed and angry, and Helen with an ashen-pale mask of curious, half-contemptuous calmness. And then, in the midst of the almost ugly tension, Severn thought fit to fling his own delicate and carefully-prepared bombshell.
"You won't need to go anywhere to see him," he announced, looking at Helen. "He'll be here any minute...."
"Here?"
I think we all said that. He watched our bewilderment, enjoying it as a conjuror enjoys the mystification of his audience. But we had had already such a surfeit of surprises that perhaps we showed less than might have been expected. He told us then that Terry had written to him, suggesting a visit, and that he (Severn) had invited him for that night without any anticipation of "this delicious little family contretemps."
Helen remained calm, saying merely: "I don't care. I can tell him here to-night as well as at any other time and place. It makes no difference to me."
And then the butler entered and spoke the name that seemed so strange to us because we never used it ourselves.
It was like a play—one of those rather obvious, melodramatic plays in which, as soon as a character announces that he is expecting somebody to call, there is always a deafening ring of the doorbell.... It was, anyhow, far too "pat" to have been an entire coincidence; and my theory is that Severn, who had exceptionally sharp ears, must have heard or seen Terry approaching along the drive....
There is a sense in which the long-deferred answer to any question is always something of an anticlimax. Often, for example, during the long interval of years, I had thought: Will he ever see her again, and if so, how and when and where?
And here, after a few moments, he was, standing before her with his bronzed face and his keen eyes and his shy, boyish smile. He didn't speak; she didn't speak; it was their first meeting since that storm-riven night eight years before.
Then he went across to Severn. To him more than to her he seemed to show emotion; he said, with almost a child's wistfulness: "Severn.... How are you?"