“Vurry kind of you, I’m shuah. Chahmed to have this little talk again.”
He gazed at the empty face, saw the drugged eyes, and 508the smirking mouth, and felt infinitely sad as a flash of her girlhood came back to his memory. “Well, good-by, Mag,” he said gently, and turned and went down the steps.
The messenger boy whom Grant Adams passed as he went down the walk to the street from the Van Dorn home, put a telegram into Mrs. Van Dorn’s lap. It was from Washington and read:
“Appointment as Federal Judge assured. Notify Sands. Have Calvin prepare article for Monday’s Times and other papers.”
She re-read it, held it in her hand for a time as she looked hungrily into the future.
While Grant Adams and Margaret were talking, the two old men on the porch, who once would have grappled with the problems of the great first cause, dropped into cackling reminiscences of the old days of the sixties and seventies when they were young men in their twenties and Harvey was an unbleached yellow pine stain on the prairie grass. So they forgot the flight of time, and forgot that indoors the music had stopped, and that two young voices were cooing behind the curtains. Upstairs, Laura Van Dorn and her mother, reading, tried with all their might and main to be oblivious to the fact that the music had stopped, and that certain suppressed laughs and gasps and long, silent gaps in the irregular conversation meant rather too obvious love-making for an affair which had not been formally recognized by the family. Yet the formality was all that was lacking. For if ever an affair of the heart was encouraged, was promoted, was greeted with everything but hurrahs and hosannas by the family of the lady thereunto appertaining, it was the love affair of Kenyon Adams and Lila Van Dorn.
The youth and the maiden below stairs were exceedingly happy. They went through the elaborate business of love-making, from the first touch of thrilling fingers to such passionately rapturous embraces as they might steal half watched and half tolerated, and the mounting joy in their hearts left no room for fear of the future. As they sat toying and frivoling behind the curtains of the wide living room in the Nesbit home, they saw Grant Adams’s big, awkward 509figure hurrying across the lawn. He walked with stooping shoulders and bowed head, and held his claw hand behind him in his flinty, red-haired hand.
“Where has he been?” asked Kenyon, as he peered through the open curtain, with his arm about the girl.
“I don’t know. The Mortons aren’t at home this afternoon; they all went out in the Captain’s big car,” answered the girl.
“Well,–I wonder–” mused the youth.