He went below.
Stephanie went back in the car, alone. She staunched her tears with her black-edged handkerchief until they ceased to fill the wonderful grey eyes.
Later, detaching the limousine hand-mirror, she inspected her countenance, patted her chestnut-tinted hair, smoothed out her mourning veil, and then, in order, lay back in the corner of the car and gave herself up to passionate memory of this boy whom she had adored from the first moment she ever laid eyes on him.
Two years' absence? She tried to figure to herself what that meant, but could not compass it. It seemed like a century of penance to be endured, to be lived through somehow.
She wanted him dreadfully already. She had no pride left, no purpose, no threats. She just wanted to tag after him—knowing perfectly well that there could be no real equality of comradeship where youth and inexperience fettered her. She didn't care; she wanted him.
No deeper sentiment, nothing less healthy and frank than her youthful adoration for him, disturbed her sorrow. The consanguinity might have been actual as far as her affections had ever been concerned with him.
That she had, at various intervals, made of him a romantic figure, altered nothing. Stainlessly her heart enshrined him; he was her ideal, hers; her brother, her idol, her paladin—the incarnation of all that was desirable and admirable in a boy, a youth, a young man. Never in all her life had any youth interested her otherwise—save, perhaps, once—that time she had met Oswald Grismer after many years, and had danced with him—and was conscious of his admiration. That was the only time in her life when her attitude toward any man had been not quite clear—not entirety definable. She wrote many pages to Cleland that night. And cried herself to sleep.
The next day her aunt came up from Bayport. And, a week later, she went away to Bayport with Miss Quest to begin what seemed to her an endless penance of two years' hospital training.
The uniform was pink with white cuffs, apron, and cap. She never forgot the first blood that soiled it—from a double mastoid operation on a little waif of twelve who had never been able to count more than six. She held sponges, horrified, crushing back the terror that widened her grey eyes, steeling herself to look, summoning every atom of strength and resolution and nerve to see her through.
They found her lying across the corridor in a dead faint.