But as they neared the parsonage his heart was smitten with pity. Suzanne looked so wan and grief-stricken and subdued, so utterly unlike the Suzanne he knew, all sparkles and ripples and laughter, like a little shallow stream running along through sunshine. The hand which was not busy at the wheel closed over Suzanne's.
"Don't give up, little girl. Maybe it will come out right, after all. Anyway, remember I'm right here if you need me."
Suzanne uttered a sound which was a little bit like a sob. When, indeed, had Roger not been right there when she needed him? though she had treated him as the very dust beneath her feet. Dear Roger! And with an impulse of penitent tenderness she gave back the pressure of his hand.
And then in a moment they were at home, where the chairs still stood stiff and angular against the wall, though up there in a quiet room above the hand that had put them in their places lay very still and white. Suzanne's mother was very sick indeed. It was she, after all, and not her willful little daughter that had pulled the family out of its comfortable rut and cast a sad spell of differentness upon the household. Suzanne had stayed away but sickness had come in and another darker guest waited outside the door, his shadow already on the threshold. Poor Suzanne! The waters were made bitter, indeed, at the falling of her star.
CHAPTER XX
SYLVIA AND LIFE
In the meanwhile Sylvia, home at Arden Hall again, slipped back very easily and naturally into the old ways and almost as easily and naturally into the new one of being engaged.
"It is really quite a comfortable state," she told Felicia. "You don't have to wonder about every new man you meet when you are all satisfactorily accounted for and checked off yourself. You can even enjoy flirting more," she added wickedly with a Sylvia twinkle, "since everybody knows you don't mean anything by it. Anyway, I'm so used to having Jack around that it isn't much different being engaged to him from not being engaged to him. I am afraid I am a hopelessly unromantic person, Felicia. I always supposed when people got engaged it was a fearsome, sublimated sort of experience like being on top of an Alp or something of the sort. But I don't feel any different from what I did before, except for the comfortable settled feeling I have already mentioned. And I'm not going to get married for a long time. I am going to make the most of the privileges and immunities of my present blissful state."
But as was perhaps natural Jack did not share his fiancée's leisurely attitude. In fact the two came more than once near to quarreling on the subject of the date of their marriage. But Sylvia's will was stronger and Sylvia would not be married for another year. That was a flat and unequivocable dictum and Jack had to put up with it as best he could. He dared not hurry his perverse lady love for it must be confessed he sometimes experienced doubts whether he had won her at all, so slight seemed the bond between them. The very tranquillizing effect of the engagement upon Sylvia was disturbing to Jack. That she could take so placidly what was the biggest thing in the universe to him was alarming and a little exasperating. Sometimes he would accuse her of not caring for him at all and then she would still further disconcert him by looking very directly and questioningly at him as if she, too, had some doubts on the subject.
Sylvia knew she had floated into the engagement from the crest of one wave of emotion to another. Her estrangement from Phil Lorrimer, her disillusionment about Jeanette's married life, the panic-stricken horror and shame with which her own affair with Porter Robinson had filled her, her generally overwrought, hysterical, nervous condition had all contributed to throw her into Jack's arms that night. He had seemed an oasis on a desert, a spar to the drowning. She had awakened soon enough to the realization that it was by no means a grand passion, a life and death affair, this placid, even affection she felt for Jack. She loved him sufficiently. She knew she could be fairly happy with him and make him happy, perhaps could even let her affection deepen into something approaching a great love in due time. They were ideal comrades already, and Sylvia had a theory that comradeship was a better basis than stormy passion for happy wedlock. Yet perhaps down in her heart there was a fear that something was lacking in it all, something that kept her stubbornly insistent on postponing the wedding for a year. Impulsively she had yielded the first redoubt. She intended to be sure of herself before she surrendered the fortress for good and all. She meant to do it in the end without reservation, for better for worse. There should be no shilly-shallying like Jeanette's in her life. That she was determined upon.