He had seen before she spoke that the weakness of the night before, from whatever cause it had arisen, had passed away; the lines about her face were set into a determined, uncompromising cheerfulness, and her voice as she spoke conveyed the same impression.
“It is more than kind of you, and I am very glad to see you,” she said. “I’m always glad to see Julian’s friend, you know.” The last words with a laugh. “You don’t happen to have met him this morning, I suppose?”
Loring signified, without a hint of sarcasm, that it was more common not to meet the man one would wish to meet in the Temple than to meet him, and Mrs. Romayne laughed again.
“I know,” she said. “But one gets an absurd impression that men doing the same thing in the same place must be always coming across one another. It’s very ridiculous, of course. You and he have always had a knack of finding one another out, though. I suppose you are quite one another’s greatest chums, aren’t you? Is ‘chum’ still the word, by-the-bye?”
“I believe so,” returned Loring carelessly. “Yes,” he continued in a different tone, “I don’t know when I’ve taken to any one as I took to Julian.”
There was a little gesture, half-mocking, half involuntary, which accepted the words as a personal compliment, and Mrs. Romayne said with a smile:
“You are a curious pair of friends, too, are you not? Julian”—her voice in uttering the name seemed to have acquired a new tenderness in the past month, and lingered over it now, evidently unconsciously and involuntarily—“Julian is such a boy, and you are—a great deal older than you ought to be.”
She shook her head at him with a reproving laugh, and he answered in his most blasé manner:
“I’m a man of the world, you see. I knew it all through and through before Julian had left school. I hope you wouldn’t have preferred another boy for his ‘chum’!”
There was a daring and a challenge in his tone which made the question personal rather to himself than to Julian; but Mrs. Romayne took it from the other point of view.