"He'll buy his freedom, if he isn't dead," he said to Nina, "and he'll
come snivelling back here, with that lost memory bunk, and they're just
fool enough to fall for it."
"I've fallen for it, and I'm at least as intelligent as you are."
Before her appraising eyes his own fell.
"Suppose I did something I shouldn't and turned up here with such a
story, would you believe it?"
"No. When you want to do something you shouldn't you don't appear to
need any excuse."
But, on the whole, they managed to live together comfortably enough.
They each had their reservations, but especially after Jim's death they
tacitly agreed to stop bickering and to make their mutual concessions.
What Nina never suspected was that he corresponded with Beverly
Carlysle. Not that the correspondence amounted to much. He had sent her
flowers the night of the New York opening, with the name of his club on
his card, and she wrote there in acknowledgment. Then, later, twice
he sent her books, one a biography, which was a compromise with his
conscience, and later a volume of exotic love verse, which was not. As
he replied to her notes of thanks a desultory correspondence had sprung
up, letters which the world might have read, and yet which had to him
the savor and interest of the clandestine.
He did not know that that, and not infatuation, was behind his desire to
see Beverly again; never reasoned that he was demonstrating to himself
that his adventurous love life was not necessarily ended; never
acknowledged that the instinct of the hunter was as alive in him as
in the days before his marriage. Partly, then, a desire for adventure,
partly a hope that romance was not over but might still be waiting
around the next corner, was behind his desire to see her again.
Probably Nina knew that, as she knew so many things; why he had taken to
reading poetry, for instance. Certain it is that when he began, early in
October, to throw out small tentative remarks about the necessity of a
business trip before long to New York, she narrowed her eyes. She
was determined to go with him, if he went at all, and he was equally
determined that she should not.
It became, in a way, a sort of watchful waiting on both sides. Then
there came a time when some slight excuse offered, and Leslie took up
the shuttle for forty-eight hours, and wove his bit in the pattern. It
happened to be on the same evening as Dick's return to the old house.