Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/176

Rh his ardour kindling as she swam once more within his social ken. “And Amherst? You know him too, I suppose? By Jove, here he is now"

He signalled a tall ﬁgure strolling slowly toward them with bent head and brooding gaze. Justine’s eye had retained a vivid image of the man with whom, scarcely three years earlier, she had lived through a moment of such poignant intimacy, and she recognized at once his lean outline, and the keen spring of his features, still veiled by the same look of inward absorption. She noticed, as he raised his hat in response to Westy Gaines’s greeting, that the vertical lines between his brows had deepened; and a moment later she was aware that this change was the visible token of others which went deeper than the fact of his good clothes and his general air of leisure and well-being—changes perceptible to her only in the startled sense of how prosperity had aged him.

“Hallo, Amherst—trying to get under cover?” Westy jovially accosted him, with a signiﬁcant gesture toward the crowded lawn from which the new-comer had evidently fled. “I was just telling Miss Brent that this is the safest place on these painful occasions—Oh, confound it, it’s not as safe as I thought! Here’s one of my sisters making for me!”

There ensued a short conﬂict of words, before his feeble flutter of resistance was borne down by a resolute [ 160 ]