Page:Dangerous Business (1927).pdf/242

 Ellen was slow to speak, for her disappointment; she had dreamed of perhaps another day. "I wish you could stay"—she wanted to say "forever" but she could only say, "much longer."

"I've got to go," he said. "Stanley Alban's dead."

"Oh!" She started up, as though at an alarm.

Suddenly, like the end of a spell, she was swept from the enchantment of her day. He and she were alone on a hilltop under pines between which the sun streamed with afternoon radiance. They had dropped to a soft, brown carpet of pine needles and, from the shade of the jackpine, they looked over the strait, over islets and to the opposite shore and over sail and ships between, but they were returned, in sight of it all, to the office and to another relation.

"Father wired me," Jay said; and he added, unthinking, "There was no other message." None from Lida, he meant, but he had not told Ellen he had wanted word of her. However, Ellen had known it. "Messages," he had said last night, when she spoke of phoning over; now he had one but, Ellen guessed, not the other expected message.

"I've got to go," Jay repeated. "I must go to Stanley as quickly as I can." And he sat silent, thinking of the old man who had died and who had maintained, to his last breath, the epoch of his own youth and loyalty to his friend's son. Jay thought of his father in the old man's silent home and the gathering, in the front room, of the elders of the church which Jay's grandfather and old Stanley together had established; he thought of them on