"I wish you would do something!" Isabelle remarked, feeling that Cairy's success might point for Vickers his own defeat, and stir him into healthy action.
"What? Write a play?"
"No—you old dear!" She caressed his hand. "I think it would be good for you to feel you were doing something in the world, instead of running about with that absurd child." She wanted to say much more about Delia Conry, but bided a more fitting time.
"I haven't run much so far," was all that Vickers replied. "You shouldn't have bothered to come down," he added when the coffee was finished. "I just wanted to poke around the old place as I used to."
"I know—and I wanted to be with you, of course, this first time. Don't you remember how we got our own breakfasts when we went shooting in the autumn?"
Her brother nodded.
"Those were good times, Vick! … They were the best for both of us," she added less buoyantly. She pushed away her cup, put her arm about his shoulders, and kissed him.
"You shouldn't say that, Belle!"
"Vickie, it's so nice to hug you and have you all to myself before the others are up. I've missed some one to go batting with me, to hug and bully and chatter with. Now you've come I shall be a girl all over again."
And Isabelle was her old self for the first time since Vickers had joined her in Paris a month before,—no longer preoccupied, striving after some satisfaction that never perfectly arrived. Here the past was upon them both,—in spite of Osgood's transformations,—a past when they had been close, in the precious intimacy of brother and sister. Outside in the new, very new Dutch garden, Isabelle resumed her anxieties of the day.