Clive and Rollins exchanged few words on the drive home. Miss Belmont’s
name was not mentioned. Clive’s feelings were mixed. He candidly
admitted that his vanity was profoundly at peace with itself, and
that Helena Belmont was the most interesting woman he had ever met.
Nevertheless, his conscience chattered at his vanity like an angry
monkey at a peacock.
“I feel exactly like a delinquent husband,” he thought. “Premonitory,
I suppose. I have an absurdly married feeling; the result of a long
engagement, probably, and a lifelong acquaintance.... I wonder if a man
ever bothers if the woman is not likely to find him out; I can’t say
it has ever worried me much before. I suppose it’s on the principle
that what a woman doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”
Then he wondered if he would have sat up all night with another woman
had he been engaged to Helena Belmont.
He made his confession three days later, when Mary was fully recovered.
She smiled a little sadly, the smile which seems to belong to the lips
of such women, fashioned to be good wives and mothers, and nothing
more. She put up her hand and touched his hair shyly; she seldom
caressed him.
“She is always sitting up all night with some one or other. It seems
to be a fad of hers. And you know I trust you absolutely.” (He had the
grace to blush.) “But, I think, if you don’t mind, that I’ll announce
the engagement.”
“Why, of course I don’t mind,” he said, taken aback. “It was your idea
to keep it quiet, not mine.”
“Yes; but I think I’d like her to know.”
As Clive left the cottage he met Rollins.
“I have something to tell you, old chap,” he said awkwardly. “I want
you to congratulate me. I am engaged to Miss Gordon.”
“The devil you are!” exclaimed Rollins slapping him vigorously on the
back, “I do congratulate you, old fellow, she’s a jewel of a girl.
Going to marry here?”
“Yes, in San Francisco.”
“The club will give you a send-off the night before. You won’t look as
handsome on your wedding-morn as you otherwise might, and you’ll have a
dark brown taste in your mouth, but in a long period of domestic bliss
you’ll have a great joy to look back upon.”
They walked down to the camp together, then Rollins left abruptly and
returning to Yorba went to the telephone office.