Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/113

102 to bed in weariness. But on this Sunday evening the melancholy which possessed him after leaving Mr. Dunbar settled into depression. He recalled the dull pang with which he had, on the May afternoon more than a year before, heard the announcement from Stewart's lips,—the dull pang that had persisted even through his happiness for his friend. But even then he had not understood how utterly he had been robbed that day of some hope that must long have been dormant in him, or how incapable he must be of finding a substitute for that which he had lost. On this night his pain and his understanding became acute.

The next Sunday he went to Avalon and lunched alone at the club; and afterwards walked out a mile beyond his grandfather's to the Dunbar house. It was closed, as he had expected to find it; under two maple-trees by the side entrance the caretaker sat in a hammock reading, and a small fox terrier frisked about her with a ball. Floyd strolled slowly along the sidewalk to which stretched the generous, unfenced lawn; it was odd, he thought, that well as he knew Lydia, or felt he knew her, he had never been inside her house. And yet, he remembered, he had seen her not very many times. It was a pretty, graceful house, with the feminine quality that suited her,—a low, rambling cottage, half brick, half wood, with ivy climbing up the walls and framing the small, diamond-paned windows. When he had reached the fence that separated the Dunbar place from its next neighbor, he turned and went back to the club, and he could not tell himself just what had impelled him to take that walk; he had passed the house often before, and it had never had quite so particular an interest for him.

He thought he should probably be less lonely and melancholy when it was opened again and he could come in occasionally and see Lydia; he was sure that would put him in better spirits.

Letty Bell gave her musical party. Only a few of the