Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/359

Rh “Mt letters are here, I suppose?” he paused on the threshold to enquire; and on the butler’s answering in the affirmative, he said to himself, with a last effort to suspend his judgment: “She has left a line—there will be some explanation"

But there was nothing—neither word nor message; nothing but the reverberating retort of her departure in the face of his return—her ﬂight to Blanche Carbury as the ﬁnal answer to his ﬁnal appeal.

XXIII

USTINE was coming back to Lynbrook.

She had been, after all, unable to stay out the ten days of her visit: the undefinable sense of being needed, so often the determining motive of her actions, drew her back to Long Island at the end of the week. She had received no word from Amherst or Bessy; only Cicely had told her, in a big round hand, that mother had been away three days, and that it had been very lonely, and that the housekeeper’s cat had kittens, and she was to have one; and were kittens christened, or how did they get their names?—because she wanted to call hers Justine; and she had found in her book a bird like the one father had shown them in the swamp; and they were not alone now, because the Telfers were there, [ 343 ]