"She is the sort that must make destiny," agreed Cairy, feeling a literary satisfaction in the phrase and also pride that he could so generously play chorus to the Senator's praise. "I fancy she will marry again!"
He wondered at the moment whether the Senator might not venture now to break his long widowerhood. The great man, stopping on the step of his club, remarked in a curious voice:—
"I suppose so,—she is young and beautiful, and would naturally not consider her life ended. And yet—she is not exactly the sort of woman a man marries—unless he is very young!"
With a nod and a little smile the Senator went briskly up the steps of his club.
CHAPTER XLVIII
The time, almost the very minute, when Isabelle realized the peculiar feeling she had come to have for Cairy, was strangely clear to her. It was shortly after Percy Woodyard's funeral. She had been to Lakewood with her mother, and having left her comfortably settled in her favorite hotel, had taken the train for New York. Tom was to go to the theatre with her that evening, and had suggested that they dine at a little down-town restaurant he used to frequent when he was Gossom's slave. He was to meet her at the ferry.
She had been thinking of Percy Woodyard, of Fosdick's epithet for Conny,—the Vampire. And there flashed across her the thought, 'She will try to get Tom back!' (Cairy had told her that he had gone to the funeral because Conny had written him a little note.) 'And she is so bad for him, so bad for any man!' Then looking out on the brown March landscape, she felt a pleasant glow of expectation, of something desirable in immediate prospect, which she did not at once attribute to anything more definite than the fact she was partly rested, after her two days at Lakewood. But when in the stream of outgoing passengers that filled the echoing terminal she caught sight of Tom's face, looking expectantly over the heads of the crowd, a vivid ray of joy darted through her.
'He's here!' she thought. 'He has come across the ferry to meet me!'
She smiled and waved the bunch of violets she was wearing—those he had sent down to Lakewood for her—above the intervening heads.
"I thought I would snatch a few more minutes," he explained, as they walked slowly through the long hall to the ferry.