When he came back, he looked a little stubborn—the old familiar look of rebellion at woman’s tyranny.
“She’ll be all right to-morrow,” he said, in answering Pamela’s eloquent querying look. “She’ll be glad to-morrow. You know that her temper’s an odd one.”
They dined alone. Everything seemed strange—Jethro so unusually precise in dress and manner, the dining-room so conventionally elegant.
[CHAPTER XX.]
AFTER dinner they went back to the drawing-room together. Nettie brought in coffee. She looked at Pamela curiously—with no very good feeling. Her sharp, impudent eyes dropped to the left hand, where Edred’s meaningless ring still gleamed. The look was not lost on Pamela. Directly the maid had left the room she slipped the ring off and put it in her purse. Jethro watched her, keen pity and indignation in his light eyes.
“If ever he comes here,” he said grimly, and with the eager instinct of a sportsman, “you must let me settle with him.”
“He will never come,” she said, slowly shaking her head. “He took all he wanted from Folly Corner.”
“Yes; I shall never see my two hundred pounds again,” the other returned ruefully, and a disagreeable silence fell over the room, the fire standing red on those two painfully tense faces.
Soon after coffee Jethro grew sleepy. He dozed spasmodically, shaking himself up at intervals, with apologetic murmurs. Pamela sat silent, her unringed hands on her lap, her eyes sadly on the coals. She resented the lack of drama in what she regarded as her home-coming. The long, varying walk had been so pregnant with possibilities. She had imagined, dreaded, dared to hope—so much. This was the end—Jethro, inert with food, sleeping like a tired dog in the armchair. Everything was settled. They had talked themselves out already. She was to stay; she was to be Cousin Pamela again. Whether they were really cousins or not they did not know—they had agreed not to trouble—it mattered not. She was back at Folly Corner. To-morrow she would pick up her dropped reins. She would go to Turle, to the Warren, to all the roomy, warm old houses; she would kiss again the placid, clumsy-souled woman. No one was to know the truth. Everything would be just as it had been before—except that there would be no question of love between her and Jethro. He tacitly insinuated that, and she as delicately agreed. It had all been conveyed by a look.