As the hall was clearing, Thurley flew down to find them.
“Oh, Dan,” she held on to his hands, “it is yourself for certain, I’m so terribly glad!” She read in his dark eyes the shadow which will rest on most of those who have fought and returned, a dangerous expression liable to turn into haunted, ugly memories, desperate longings and unwise impulses.
Lorraine wondered if Thurley read the same problem which she had discerned even while he was kissing her his welcome.
“It is mighty good to be back,” was all he said. “A man doesn’t know what he is going to miss until it is too late. But you’ve done a wonderful thing. Lorraine tells me it is to be permanent.” Yet the dangerous expression of his eyes seemed to ridicule his own praise.
“Don’t you think Lorraine looks well?” Thurley asked to cover the pause.
“Yes, Lorraine is always the same, thank fortune! The Boy is the only one who has changed.”
Lorraine flushed, thinking all in an instant of how dangerously near she had come to being forever changed, emancipated, as Hortense Quinby would have called it, leaving her fireside untended to pursue phantoms of restless imagination. She smiled in understanding at Thurley as Dan began to say what a splendid overseer Ali Baba made and how good it was to see the old town and surely if Miss Clergy could understand, she would be well pleased with Thurley’s disposal of her fortune. As he talked, he rested his weight first on one foot and then the other, his eyebrows twitching and his hands working together and when Thurley asked as to his own condition, he was brusque almost to rudeness in refusing to consider it of importance.
“If I had only got bumped good and proper,” he declared, “I wouldn’t mind, but I hate this sort of air cushion, cruel invaliding of a man.... Of course you can’t understand because you haven’t been into things. It’s the same as a race horse sold to a cabstand and made to trot slowly to the station with a burden of nervous spinsters!”
Thurley understood the meaning of his expression and the readjustment he must face. She mercifully let Dan go on his way, while Ali Baba swept down on her to report all that had and had not happened during her absence.