"When did you come back?" asked Edna in an unsteady voice, wiping her
face with her handkerchief. She seemed ill at ease on the piano stool,
and he begged her to take the chair by the window.
She did so, mechanically, while he seated himself on the stool.
"I returned day before yesterday," he answered, while he leaned his arm
on the keys, bringing forth a crash of discordant sound.
"Day before yesterday!" she repeated, aloud; and went on thinking to
herself, "day before yesterday," in a sort of an uncomprehending way.
She had pictured him seeking her at the very first hour, and he had
lived under the same sky since day before yesterday; while only by
accident had he stumbled upon her. Mademoiselle must have lied when she
said, "Poor fool, he loves you."
"Day before yesterday," she repeated, breaking off a spray of
Mademoiselle's geranium; "then if you had not met me here to-day you
wouldn't--when--that is, didn't you mean to come and see me?"
"Of course, I should have gone to see you. There have been so many
things--" he turned the leaves of Mademoiselle's music nervously. "I
started in at once yesterday with the old firm. After all there is as
much chance for me here as there was there--that is, I might find it
profitable someday. The Mexicans were not very congenial."
So he had come back because the Mexicans were not congenial; because
business was as profitable here as there; because of any reason, and not
because he cared to be near her. She remembered the day she sat on the
floor, turning the pages of his letter, seeking the reason which was
left untold.
She had not noticed how he looked--only feeling his presence; but she
turned deliberately and observed him. After all, he had been absent but
a few months, and was not changed. His hair--the color of hers--waved
back from his temples in the same way as before. His skin was not more
burned than it had been at Grand Isle. She found in his eyes, when he
looked at her for one silent moment, the same tender caress, with an
added warmth and entreaty which had not been there before the same
glance which had penetrated to the sleeping places of her soul and
awakened them.
A hundred times Edna had pictured Robert's return, and imagined their
first meeting. It was usually at her home, whither he had sought her out
at once. She always fancied him expressing or betraying in some way his
love for her. And here, the reality was that they sat ten feet apart,
she at the window, crushing geranium leaves in her hand and smelling
them, he twirling around on the piano stool, saying: