He had another trick, too, of retiring within himself, even when smiling at her sallies or banteringly evading her challenge to a duel of wits. At such times he no longer looked very young; she had noticed that more than once. He looked old, and ill-tempered.
Perhaps some sorrow—the actuality being vague in her mind; perhaps some hidden suffering—but she learned that he had never been wounded in battle and had never even had measles.
The sudden sullen pallor, the capricious fits of silent reserve, the smiling aloofness, she never attributed to the real source. How could she? The Incomprehensible Thing was a Finality accomplished according to law. And the woman concerned was now another man's wife. Which conclusively proved that there could be no regret arising from the Incomprehensible Finality, and that nobody involved cared, much less suffered. Hence that was certainly not the cause of any erratic or specific phenomena exhibited by this sample of man who differed, as she had noticed, somewhat from the rank and file of his neutral-tinted brothers.
"It's this particular specimen, per se," she concluded; "it's himself, sui generis—just as I happen to have red hair. That is all."
And she rode on quite happily, content, confident of his interest and kindness. For she had never forgotten his warm response to her when she stood on the threshold of her first real dinner party, in her first real dinner gown—a trivial incident, trivial words! But they had meant more to her than any man specimen could understand—including the man who had uttered them; and the violets, which she found later with his card, must remain for her ever after the delicately fragrant symbol of all he had done for her in a solitude, the completeness of which she herself was only vaguely beginning to realise.
Thinking of this now, she thought of her brother—and the old hurt at his absence on that night throbbed again. Forgive? Yes. But how could she forget it?
"I wish you knew Gerald well," she said impulsively; "he is such a dear fellow; and I think you'd be good for him—and besides," she hastened to add, with instinctive loyalty, lest he misconstrue, "Gerald would be good for you. We were a great deal together—at one time."
He nodded, smilingly attentive.
"Of course when he went away to school it was different," she added. "And then he went to Yale; that was four more years, you see."
"I was a Yale man," remarked Selwyn; "did he—" but he broke off abruptly, for he knew quite well that young Erroll could have made no senior society without his hearing of it. And he had not heard of it—not in the cane-brakes of Leyte where, on his sweat-soaked shirt, a small pin of heavy gold had clung through many a hike and many a scout and by many a camp-fire where the talk was of home and of the chances of crews and of quarter-backs.