Months later, when she learned all the truth, it was too late.
"Of course you're being here won't keep me away, if you care to have me come."
He was all dignity and charm then. They needed youth in that quiet place. They ought all to be able to forget the past, which was done with, anyhow. He showed the first genuine interest she had found in her work at the camp, and before his unexpected geniality the girl opened like a flower.
And all the time he was watching her with calculating eyes. He was a gambler with life, and he rather suspected that he had just drawn a valuable card.
"Thank you," he said gravely, when she had finished. "You have done a lot to bridge the gulf that lies--I am sure you have noticed it--between the people who saw service in this war and those who stayed at home."
Suddenly Lily saw that the gulf between her family and herself was just that, which was what he had intended.
When Elinor came in they were absorbed in conversation, Lily flushed and eager, and her husband smiling, urbane, and genial.
To Lily, Elinor Doyle had been for years a figure of mystery. She had not seen her for many years, and she had, remembered a thin, girlish figure, tragic-eyed, which eternally stood by a window in her room, looking out. But here was a matronly woman, her face framed with soft, dark hair, with eyes like her father's, with Howard Cardew's ease of manner, too, but with a strange passivity, either of repression or of fires early burned out and never renewed.
Lily was vaguely disappointed. Aunt Elinor, in soft gray silk, matronly, assured, unenthusiastically pleased to see her; Doyle himself, cheerful and suave; the neat servant; the fire lit, comfortable room,--there was no drama in all that, no hint of mystery or tragedy. All the hatred at home for an impulsive assault of years ago, and--this!
"Lily, dear!" Elinor said, and kissed her. "Why, Lily, you are a woman!"
"I am twenty, Aunt Elinor."
"Yes, of course. I keep forgetting. I live so quietly here that the days go by faster than I know." She put Lily back in her chair, and glanced at her husband.
"Is Louis coming to dinner, Jim?"
"Yes."
"I suppose you cannot stay, Lily?"
"I ought to tell you, Aunt Elinor. Only mother knows that I am here."
Aunt Elinor smiled her quiet smile.
"I understand, dear. How are they all?"