“I do seem quite well,” he agreed surprisingly. “Honora, I'm the next thing to fifty. Would any one guess it?”
This was a new aspect of Paret's, and she studied him keenly, with the slightly satirical mouth inherited from her father. Embarrassment became evident at his exhibition of trivial pride, and nothing more was said until, winding through the gloom of Cottarsport, they had reached her house. Inside there was a wide hall with the stair mounting on the right under a panelled arch. Mrs. Coz-zens, Honora's aunt and companion, was in the drawing room when they entered, and greeted Paret Fifield with the simple friendliness which, clearly without disagreeable intent, she reserved for an unquestionable few.
After dinner, the elder woman winding wool from an ivory swift clamped to a table, Honora thought that Paret had never been so vivacious; positively he was silly. For no comprehensible reason her mind turned to Jason Burrage, striding with a lowered head, in his incongruous clothes, through the town of his birth.
“I wonder, Paret,” she remarked, “if you remember two men who went from here to California about ten years ago? Well, one of them is back with his pockets full of gold and a silk hat. He was engaged to Olive Stanes... I suppose their wedding will happen at any time. You see, he was faithful like yourself, Paret.”
The man's back was toward her; he was examining, as he had on every visit Honora could recall, the curious objects in a lacquered cabinet brought from over-seas by Ithiel Canderay, and it was a noticeably long time before he turned. Mrs. Cozzens, the shetland converted into a ball, rose and announced her intention of retiring; a thin, erect figure in black moiré with a long countenance and agate brown eyes, seed pearls, gold band bracelets, and a Venise point cap.
When she had gone the silence in the room became oppressive. Honora was thinking of her life in connection with Paret Fifield, wondering if she could ever bring herself to marry him. She would have to decide soon: it seemed incredible that he was nearing fifty. Why, it must have been fifteen years ago when he first——
“Honora,” he pronounced, leaning forward in his chair, “I came prepared to tell you a particular thing, but I find it much more difficult than I had anticipated.”
“I know,” she replied, and her voice, the fact she pronounced, seemed to come from a consciousness other than hers; “you are going to get married.”
“Exactly,” he said with a deep, relieved sigh.
She had on a dinner dress looped with a silk ball fringe, and her fingers automatically played with the hanging ornaments as she studied him with a composed face.