The afternoon was taken up with rehearsal for to-morrow evening’s
program in the college chapel. Once Eileen was on the brink of the
sordid past. She had met Adelaide Nims with unruffled composure;
but when Kitten joked her about her prospective sister-in-law, and
Ina wanted to know how many evenings a week Hal was in the habit of
spending with her, she almost forgot the rôle she had been playing ...
that in New York she was Mrs. Winthrop, whereas in Springdale she was
still Eileen Trench, and presumably betrothed to Mrs. Nims’ brother.
“You can’t fool us,” Miss Henderson teased. “I bet Ina a pair of
gold-buckled garters that you’d follow Hal to New York, instead of
going to college here. And your mother didn’t get by, this morning,
with that line of talk about keeping you at home. She wouldn’t tear you
and Hal apart for the world.”
Eileen felt a sinking in the region of her solar plexus, but she
contrived a flippant retort, and took up her violin. She had not
remembered that Hal Marksley was in Brooklyn ... that she was likely
to meet him in the subway or at the theatre, any day. In the onrush of
her first disillusionment he had been carried beyond her ken, as an
obstruction of logs and floating débris is torn from its moorings and
scattered in meaningless fragments by the violence of a spring flood.