In fact, it was over this question that he flattered himself had come their split. She had given him, to be sure, a pretty broad hint that day on the landing stage, but the actual rupture of their engagement had not come till a week later, and Kate was clever enough to make Mr. Austin think that the idea was his and his alone. Still they had parted on excellent terms, and any service, professional or otherwise, that Austin could render her in the future was one that he should look forward to, as he promised, most keenly.
"Though you cannot see your way to be my husband," she had said to him lightly, "you will still upon occasion act as my solicitor?"
"Let's call it 'friend,' Kate," he had answered, and they parted on that.
But that day, after Aunt Jane had showed her the Carter leader in the paper, Kate went to her room, and somehow her thoughts went back to Henry Austin. She tried to analyze why she had ever got engaged to him. As far as she could define it, a sort of empty space, a partial vacuum, had come into her life, and Austin appeared, and in a tentative way seemed to fill it. Now that he was gone, the vacuum returned. It did not exactly ache, but it caused a vague discomfort that annoyed her, and when she demanded a cure, something within her kept repeating, "Carter, Carter, Carter!"
She resented this clamor. She told herself that she was a strong woman. She refused to have her hand forced. She declined to allow an ex-employe of her own to be forced into her life as its only complement. And still that inner something, with irritating persistency, kept repeating, "Carter, Carter," and then got unpleasantly familiar, and began to murmur: "George."
She stood it for an hour, stood for that time persistent, inward voices urging her, with never a falter, to one narrow course, and then she got up from her great cushioned chair and went to an old Sheraton bureau. Only one narrow drawer in it was locked, and she carried the key of that amongst the charms on her watch-bangle. She opened the drawer and took from it a photograph.
It was only a steamer group, crudely taken by an amateur on a kodak film, a very imperfect thing at its best, and mottled now by the persistent West African mildew. A piece of brown paper with a hole in it was in the same drawer, a mask so cut that it blocked out all of the group except one individual. She fitted this into place and gazed her fill on this very crude presentment of George Carter.