The car, pushing through a mean and shabby neighborhood, offensive to refined eyes, ears, and nostrils, now turned into a narrow street brisk with the din of business, but by no means lovely to look upon. Recalling the Cooney presence, Cally suddenly stirred with the deadly self-protective instinct of her sex, and directed Hen to cease instantly all thinking about her and Mr. Canning. She did it, needless to say, scientifically, by saying with just the plausible degree of interest:
"I meant to ask you--what on _earth_ was the trouble with Hortense, Hen? I supposed she was a perfect _fixture_ with you, an institution!"
"What's the trouble with all the servants in this town?" cried Hen. "I tell you, Cally, I don't know what's going to become of us. Why ..."
She launched with zest upon the somewhat unoriginal thesis, and Cally relapsed into her own thoughts, which were full of rebellion at the bitter untowardness of her fate....
Much water had flowed under the bridge of sighs since the parting in the library. Passed long since, it seemed, was that uprush of burning humiliation; subdued was the betraying flare-up (mamma's favorite word nowadays)--vanished to thin air like a midsummer madness, delirium's delusion, hardly possible to understand, much less recapture, now. A day had hardly passed, after the second rejection of Mr. Canning at her door, before the thought of whistling him back again flashed luringly across Carlisle's mind. She repelled the thought, but it recurred, and she came to dally with it, ably assisted in that direction by mamma. What had he done to warrant such absurd melodramatics?... More and more her mind had fastened upon the genuine tenderness, the emotion, the man had shown in his last moment with her. In love with her without quite realizing it himself, he had in the moment of parting been swept away by his feelings, and had taken a not strictly authorized kiss or two. What Sir Galahad among men was proof against such a tripping in the presence of lovely and irresistible temptation?...
"Hortense gave you no notice at all?" she demanded out of a dream.
He was to pause once again, to bid the Paynes farewell, on his final progress back to what he had once called lights and home. That would be in April, said Cousin Willie Kerr, when his six months' sentence ran out. The distant promise brought the girl no comfort now. Why, really, should she not take this new opportunity he had given her, and dispatch him a little note, saying in a friendly way that she had wanted to see him again? By day after to-morrow, he could be at her side....