“When did you, Jack?” she demanded.
“An hour ago. I’ve been in the strangest mood ever since.”
“Come, now, and tell me about it,” she suddenly saw the need to say, walking away from him to dismiss the grinning chauffeur.
Hastings lingered alone in the hall.
“It’s much nicer by the fire,” Julia called to him impatiently from the next room. And he followed the sound of her voice; he moved slowly over to a chair, opposite her own, and sat down, forgetting to talk. “I vow I’m amused,” she exclaimed, “at the way you take it. You’ve made letters full of fun of me for settling my parents ’on that ugly little Massachusetts point’; you’ve laid it all down to my ‘Middle-Western love of Puritan relics’ and ‘Eastern culturine,’ and scorned my ‘romantic inexperience’; and here you come, redolent of Europe, to be as much impressed by our choice as if you were a Montana school-girl!” He smiled back, but it was obvious that he hadn’t heard a word. “What’s the matter with you, Jacky?” she asked interestedly; “had a bad journey?”
He tried to concentrate his faculties on looking genial and at the same time intelligent.
“It was just like me, Julia,” he began, the ghost of cheerfulness on his face. “I took the earliest sort of train, instead of the one I telephoned you I’d take. You see, to have landed at night, after all the years—think of it! And then to go walking around by myself, seeing things crop suddenly up that I hadn’t thought of since—well—scarcely since I was born. No wonder I couldn’t sleep. This morning, like a stranded idiot, I got out at that little way-station of yours, and realized for the first time that I didn’t have a blessed idea where you lived.”
“Rockface is about as enormous as a biscuit. Anybody could have told you.”
“That’s the strangest part of it,” recollected Hastings. “You see, I had a curious hunch about it; I felt a little forsaken. I was actually surprised and irritated that somebody—I didn’t know who—wasn’t waiting to meet me.
“There was something about the place, Julia,” he gravely pursued, “made me feel justified in thinking a hospitable welcome was due me ... Oh I don’t mean because you were here! But—well—the veil of sea-turn that half-hid the buildings across the square made me feel the need of some kind of greeting—I expected one!—right on the spot! Can you understand? And—instead—the cold east wind blew round me as if I were an outcast.