Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/309

Rh Nathan, and your little gray-and-lavender lady too! You never can tell."

Nathan replied, "It may straighten things out for some of us, Mrs. Barton."

"It may straighten things out for me and the little gray-and-lavender lady." That was what Nathaniel Cawthorne was thinking. That was what he said outloudout-loud [sic] to himself, a half-hour later, upstairs in his bedroom, where he stood gazing down at the plain gold wedding-ring, strung onto a long black ribbon, lying in the palm of his hand. He had to look at this wedding-ring ever so often, to assure himself that it really did exist. He had to summon before his vision, every little while, the bright image of Rebecca in her wedding-dress, sitting beside him in the wine-colored lined limousine, telling him in earnest tones that she wasn't the least bit sorry in the world that she had married him, to persuade himself that the author of the cool blue notes had actually been pronounced his wife.

They were unconvincing little notes. They left him hungry and disappointed. They aroused vague doubts in his breast. The only way he could quiet those doubts was by rehearsing over and over again every detail of the meetings with Rebecca that might go to prove that she had cared for him, concluding always with that last kiss in the railroad station.

He had not urged that kiss. She had given it to him of her own free will. What if her notes were brief and far-between? What if she had rebuffed his overbold expressions of affection, recoiled from his freedom in addressing her as his wife, in signing himself her husband? He must remember that she had