The school play gave Lena nothing of what she pathetically called "fun." And when she went with me to the factory dances, she turned up her nose at the men, not one of whom was, she said, a "dresser." She told me that she hated to be with anybody who knew more than she did. In a fortnight she went back to Luke's aunt to stay, I suspected, as long as her small money held out at the motion-picture shows.
CHAPTER XIII
It was just before Lena left us that Mrs. Carney telephoned one day for me to come to her house to dinner on the following night. "He's back!" I said to myself as I hung up the receiver; for by now Mrs. Carney had guessed something of John Ember's place in my life, though we had never spoken of it. But he was not back, now, any more than he had been all the other times that I had leaped at the hope, in these three years. It was some one else who had come back.
Mr. Arthur Carney was in Europe that year, and I went there that night without thinking that there was such a person as he in the world, so long had I forgotten his existence. But Mrs. Carney told me that she had had, the day before, a telegram to say that he had landed in New York and would be at home by the end of the week. While we were waiting for dinner to be announced, he unexpectedly appeared in her drawing-room. And he said to her, before all those people:
"You see, my dear, I've come to surprise you. I've come to see how well you amuse yourself while I am away."
He said that he would go in to dinner with us just as he was. He was welcomed by everybody, and, of course, Mrs. Carney introduced him to me. She could have had no better answer to what he had just said to her.
"May I present my husband, Miss Wakely?" she said. "Arthur, she was once at the factory. You may remember——"
He had grown stouter, and his face was pink, and his head was pink through his light hair. He carried a glass and stared at me through it, and then he dropped his glass and said: