“Let’s not hand out the retribution to Cummings till Kemp’s satisfied about the motor,” suggested Grace.
“We’re all proud of you, Stephen,” said Mrs. Durland, smoothing the creases in the check. “I’m writing Roy tonight and I’ll tell him the good news. Of course I’ll warn him not to speak of it. Your success will be a great incentive to the dear boy. He was so contrite over his behavior while he was home that I’m glad to have this news for him. We should all feel grateful. Something told me when Isaac Cummings turned you out that it was for the best. I’ll never again question the ways of Providence. I don’t feel like taking this money, Stephen, but it will come in handy in giving Roy a start.”
In the happier spirit that now dominated the home circle Grace’s increasingly frequent absences for evenings and occasionally for a night passed with little or no remark.
“You’ve got to live your life in your own way,” Mrs. Durland would say with a sigh when she found Grace leaving the house after supper. “I hardly see you any more.”
To guard against awakening in Ethel’s mind any suspicion that her evenings away from home coincided with Trenton’s presence in town, which her father usually mentioned, Grace made a point of going out at times when Trenton was away. There were always things she could do—entertainments among the Shipley employees, dances, theatre parties of business girls with whom she had become acquainted. These engagements she refrained from describing with any particularity as this would make the more marked her silence on evenings when she went to Minnie Lawton’s to meet Trenton. She had adopted a regular formula when she left the house, saying merely, “I’m going out for a little while,” which her mother and Ethel had schooled themselves to accept as an adequate explanation of her absences.
Mrs. Bob Cummings looked in on her one day at Shipley’s with the promised invitation to dinner, and to go to a club dance afterwards, which Grace refused only because the dramatic club of Shipley employees was giving a play the same night and she had a leading part. And Miss Reynolds dropped in to the ready-to-wear department frequently when she was down town and occasionally asked Grace to dinner.
The mild winter almost imperceptibly gave way before the blithe heralds of spring and April appeared smiling at the threshold.
No cloud darkened the even course of her affair with Trenton. She was more and more convinced of the depth and sincerity of her love for him and he was the tenderest, the most considerate of lovers. When she did not see him, sometimes for a week or fortnight, his messages floated back with those constant reassurances of his loyalty and affection that are the very food of love. He rarely mentioned his wife in their talks and Grace was no longer a prey to jealousy. She wondered sometimes whether he had ever broached to Mrs. Trenton the matter of the divorce at which he had hinted, but Grace found herself caring little about this one way or another. She exulted in her independence, complacent in the thought that she was a woman of the Twentieth Century, free to use her life as she would.
IV
John Moore had not crossed Grace’s vision since the afternoon of Christmas day, when his unexpected appearance in the highway near The Shack proved so disconcerting. She suspected that he was avoiding her, probably from a generous wish to spare her the embarrassment of explaining herself.