Instinctively she felt that this Derry was in some way different from the Derry she had left the day before. There was a hint of masterfulness, a touch of decision.
"Will you remember?" he repeated, hands tight on her shoulders.
"Yes," she said, simply.
He bent and kissed her. "Then nothing else will matter." He placed a big chair for her in front of the fire, and drew another up in front of it. Bending forward, he took her hands. "I am glad I found you alone. What luck it was to find you alone!"
He tried then to tell her what he had come to tell. Yet, after all there was much that he left unsaid. How could he speak to her of the things he had seen in his father's shadowed house? How fill that delicate mind with a knowledge of that which seemed even to his greater sophistication unspeakable?
So she wondered over several matters. "How can he want to marry Hilda? I can't imagine any man wanting Hilda."
"She is handsome in a big fine way."
"But she is not big and fine. She is little and mean, but I could never make Daddy see it."
He wondered if McKenzie would see it now.
Mary Connolly, coming in through the back door to her warm kitchen, heard voices. Standing in the dark hall which connected the left wing with the house, she could see through into the living room where Jean sat with her lover.