"Of course not." But he had no pretty things to say.
The life that he lived with her, however, and with Pip and Winifred and Tony was a heady wine which swept away regrets. He had no time to think. He worked by day and played by night, and often after their play there was work again. Now and then, as the Sunday night when he had first met Marie-Louise, he motored with Austin out to Westchester. Mrs. Austin spent her summers there. Long journeys tired her, and she would not leave her husband. Marie-Louise stayed at "Rose Acres" because she hated big hotels, and found cottage colonies stupid. The great gardens swept down to the river—the wide, blue river with the high bluffs on the sunset side.
The river at Bower's was not blue; it showed in the spring the red of the clay which was washed into it, and now and then a clear green when the rains held off, but it was rarely blue except on certain sapphire days in the fall, when a northwest wind swept all clouds from the sky.
And this was not a singing river. It was too near the sea, and too full of boats, and there was no reason why it should say, "Come and see—come and see—the world," when the world was at its feet!
And so the great Hudson had no song for Richard. Yet now and then, as he walked down to it in the warm darkness, his ears seemed to catch a faint echo of the harmonies which had filled his soul on the day that Anne Warfield had dried her hair on the bank of the old river at Bower's, and had walked with him in the wood.
Except at such moments, however, it must be confessed that he thought little of Anne Warfield. It hurt to think of her. And he was too much of a surgeon to want to turn the knife in the wound.
Marie-Louise, developing a keen interest in his affairs as they grew better acquainted, questioned him about Evelyn.
"Dad says you are going to marry her."
"Yes."
"Is she pretty?"