Frederica, giving Zip a lump of sugar and making a solitary cup of tea for herself, did not know that she was beckoning....
When, at five o'clock, a motor came chugging along the road, and Arthur Weston opened the door and demanded tea, he, at least, felt the invitation—which was not for him. The white curtains, the open piano, the warmth and fragrance and pleasantness, and, most of all, Frederica, sitting on a little stool by the fire, her face sparkling with welcome. Everything was beckoning!
Standing up, warming his hands at the fire while Fred ran out to the kitchen to make fresh tea for him, the caller read the names of the books lined up in a row between the lighted candles on the mantelpiece, and whistled.
"Is this your light reading?" he said, as she came back with the cream-pitcher. "For Heaven's sake, lay in some funny papers for the simple male mind!" Then he pulled Zip's ears, took his tea, and said he wished he could ever get enough sugar.
"I saw Maitland on Thursday," he said, reaching for another lump.
"Yes, he is on deck," Fred said.
Her man of business made a hopeless, laughing gesture, as if he gave up trying to solve a puzzle. "Are they engaged, or aren't they?" he said to himself. Her way of speaking of the cub was certainly as indifferent as it well could be! "But that doesn't prove anything," he thought, drearily.
He stayed a long time; he had a feeling that his call was a sort of last chapter. "In about a week I'll get one of those confounded engagement letters," he told himself. He settled down in the morris chair—the chair in which Howard was to sit the next evening—and started her talking. He did not need to make any replies. Once Frederica "got going" on her own affairs he could watch her in lazy, tender silence.... How soon it would be over—this watching and listening! How soon his plaything would be transformed into a happy, self-absorbed, quite uninteresting wife and mother! For Fred Maitland, he was cynically aware, would cease to interest him, because she would cease to be preposterous; she would be normal. Of course Fred Payton would always be a darling memory; she would never leave his heart. His heart ached at the thought of its own emptiness if he should try to turn Fred Payton out just because Fred Maitland was another man's wife. No, he would not even try to forget his wild, sweet, silly Freddy! She should always remain as, back somewhere in his memory, Kate remained, dark-browed and cruel. The Kate of to-day, whose presence in his heart would be an impropriety, was not even an individual to him! But the old Kate was his. He wondered if Fred would ever become as vague to him as Mrs. Kate——.... "What is her name! Oh, yes—Bailey. When I heard she'd married him, I didn't sleep for two nights; and now I can hardly remember his name! 'Men have died, and worms have eaten them—' ... Fred, almost all the houses out here are boarded up. I only saw a light in one house."