“Come in, honey, won’t you? Catch your death if you stay out like this.”
Her arms dropped. She turned and followed him indoors. But opening his own window a while later he saw her slim silhouette outlined against hers, upright with the dusky light of a lamp behind her.
The next day at their noon breakfast he asked what time she had gone to bed.
“I don’t know. The night was so fascinating, I stayed up with it until day came.” She looked as if she had not slept.
Cleeburg lit a prodigiously long cigar, twirled it between his lips and settled back benignly in an armchair by the fire.
“Well, children, I’m here for the afternoon. Drive over to the club or do whatever you like. Little ’Dolph’s going to get busy doing nothing.”
He reached over without altering his position of solid comfort and picked at random one of the Sunday papers piled on the table beside him. His broad face was suffused with a look of utter peace and relaxation. Even the ever-active cigar suspended activities.
Gloria’s lips touched his forehead.
“We’ll go for a walk—back at four-thirty for tea.”
[193]
] His eyes went after her the length of the foyer to a side door opening on the gravel walk—Gloria in dull green sport coat and tam, a fur piece swung carelessly from one shoulder; and the tall well-knit man in knickerbockers whose elastic step so easily fell in with hers. Had they followed farther they would have seen two people tramping in silence along a country road strewn with leaves that faded from green to mottled dead brown under a sullen sky. They would have marveled at the set look of the man’s mouth, the quivering of the woman’s. Those sympathetic prominent eyes of his, always seeking the most beautiful way to simulate human emotion, would have clouded with question had they read the pain in both pairs that stared straight along the road without meeting.