“Silliest of boys,” she said; “the topic is threadbare. I am quite well! Oh, it is very evident that my retiring to bed for a day or two is an unparalleled event, or you would not be quite so slow in grasping the fact that it is possible to recover after such a terrific crisis! Now, do promise not to talk any more about what you don’t in the least understand!”
The merriment of her tone was fictitious, even to Julian’s unheeding ear, but he took it up with a mental shrug of his shoulders. It was not his fault, he told himself, if she would overdo herself for the sake of a little excitement.
He told himself the same thing, carelessly enough, when he put her into her carriage two or three hours later. It was early; Mrs. Romayne had declared the party to be insufferably dull and had stayed only half an hour, during which time she had been as vivacious and attractive as usual. But towards the end her eyes had become feverishly bright, and Julian, as he took her out, could feel that she was trembling from head to foot.
“Are you coming home?” she said to him.
“Well, if you don’t mind, dear, I was thinking of going to look up Loring at the club.”
A breath of relief parted Mrs. Romayne’s lips, and she answered hastily. Apparently she had no desire for her son’s company on her way home.
“Go, by all means!” she said. “Of course I don’t mind!”
She pulled up the window almost abruptly, nodding to him with a smile, the singular ghastliness of which was, presumably, referable to some effect of gaslight. Then as the carriage rolled away she sank back and let her face relax into an expression of utter weariness, with a little gasping catch of her breath as of deadly physical exhaustion.
His words about Loring had been a mere figure of speech on Julian’s part, but he did intend to go to the club, and he carried his intention into effect. He glanced round the smoking-room as he went in to see if Loring was there, but the fact that he was not visible in no way affected his serenity. He was so altered from the boy of a twelvemonth before, and his intercourse with Loring had been so completely suspended during the period of his developement, that their friendship seemed now to belong to some previous phase of his existence; it was his sense that he had passed utterly out of touch with the man with whom he had once been intimate, together with a conviction that Loring’s keen perceptions would be by no means a desirable factor in his surroundings at the moment, that had dictated his demonstration of delight at Loring’s reappearance. An outward show of enthusiasm was a very effective blind, in his opinion.
His manner was regulated on the same principle on Loring’s appearance in the smoking-room about half an hour later. He was on his way to the card-room, and he was anything but pleased at the frustration of his plans in that direction; but his reception of Loring indicated, rather, that he had spent the last half-hour in watching for him.