Thoroughly imbued with the precepts of her more gifted husband, Mrs. Price allowed herself to fall into a fatal way of applying scriptural similitudes, or, as Dr. Gerry irreverently phrased it, of “talking shop.”
The judge smiled involuntarily, leaning back in his chair, a massive figure, his fine head scantily covered with iron-gray hair, and his keen eye as bright at sixty-five as Faunce remembered it when he himself had been a lad of ten. He tossed back a reply now with a gleam of amusement.
“It takes your imagination, Cousin Julia, to clothe the antarctic in milk and honey. Poor fellow! As I understand it, Faunce, Overton perished as much from hunger and exhaustion as from cold!” he added, turning toward the guest of honor.
Faunce seemed to flinch, and an expression of such keen distress passed over his handsome face that it awoke a glow of sympathy, almost of cordiality, in the breast of Diane Herford. There was a little silence. Mrs. Price, her daughter, Fanny, her husband, the dean, and Dr. Gerry all stopped talking to listen to the young man’s expected reply. It was the kind of hush that expressed not only sympathy, but something like awe of a great tragedy enacted in a distant and unknown clime, where even death has been obscured by the mystery and silence of those frozen solitudes.
Faunce had been admirable all the evening—brilliant, convincing, and yet becomingly modest; but now he stretched out an unsteady hand, lifted his wine-glass to his lips, tried in vain to swallow some liquor, and set it down with a gesture of despair.
“Don’t speak of it!” he exclaimed in a faltering voice. “We were together—I can never forget it, I——” He broke off, and recovered himself. “Pardon me if I can’t talk of it, can’t tell you about it yet. The time may come, but now——”
He ceased speaking and stared straight in front of him with unseeing eyes, his powerful but shapely hand unconsciously clenched on the edge of the table.
Dr. Gerry, an old family friend and an eminent practitioner, suspended his dissection of the duck to cast a keen glance at Faunce. He had the searching eyes of the professional observer, set well back under heavy brows, a quantity of short red hair, and a square jaw that was somewhat relieved by the whimsical lines about his tight, thin-lipped mouth and the puckers at the corners of his eyes.
There was a significance in the doctor’s glance which did not escape the troubled eyes of Diane. When he turned it suddenly upon her, she averted her face, unable to meet its perfectly apparent suspicion. She knew that Dr. Gerry had long ago surmised her attachment to Overton, and her hand trembled slightly as she picked up her fork and tried once more to make a pretense of eating her dinner.
She was so completely absorbed in her own unhappiness, in the thrill of misery and pride that stirred her heart at the thought of the gallant man who had died as he had always lived, in her eyes, like a hero, that she awoke from her reverie to find that she had lost the thread of the conversation, which had been hastily resumed to cover Faunce’s collapse.