Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/204

 brief moment, but it came back at a word, a glance, a thought, more somber and more sinister than before.

“Then he’ll be here⸺”

“Any minute, I suppose,” replied Val. “I say, let’s go for a walk—you could show me the grounds, you know. I’ll look them over and tell you where the money is,” he promised.

“That’ll be good,” she said soberly, rising.

She showed him the racetrack, the south end of which was less than fifty yards from the house. They walked around it in silence for some time, admiring the dogwood with its splendor of foliage and fruit, seeing ever the far off hills in front of them, feeling the slight breeze on their faces, and knowing that they two were together and that it was the springtime of life though the year was at the fall.

They said little for a long time, yet they felt close to each other, drawn by an indefinable yet irresistible bond, a community of interests and tastes, perhaps, that neither could put into words—unnecessary as words were. When they did talk it was of trivialities, of light, immaterial things, of the blue sea at Capri or a sunset across Coronado Bay, when you take the ferry from San Diego, of Madame Butterfly and of Elinor Glyn, of adolescence and of age, of the fact that the motion pictures, which could have been an art, had become nothing but an industry, a business for business men, of a prelude of Rachmaninoff’s—not prelude, but another which both were familiar with and which both decided was the better  of sealing wax  of cabbages  of what young people talk when they foregather and their blood runs warm and strong.

The sun was going down rapidly when they suddenly