He had never yet spoken to Laura Lou about Hayes. On his return that evening, when he went to her room, he made up his mind to do so. The room looked pleasant. There was a fire in the stove and a bunch of spring flowers on the table. Laura Lou's bed was neatly made, and she lay on the old steamer chair which he had brought up from the porch. Mrs. Tracy was below, preparing supper, and the house, sometimes so dreary and repellent to him, seemed peaceful and homelike. Laura Lou's face lit up at his entrance. "Here—I brought you these. They're good and juicy," he said, pulling a couple of oranges out of his overcoat pockets. He bent to kiss her, and she pressed her cheek against his. "Oh, they're beauties, Vanney; but you oughtn't to have spent all that money."

He sat down beside her, laughed, and said: "I've spent a lot more; I've paid off what was owing to Hayes."

She flushed a tender rose colour. "Oh, Vanny! The whole of it? Isn't that great?" Her hands tightened in his. "Mother'll be crazy glad. But it's such a lot of money; how in the world did you manage?"

"Oh I … I fixed it up. It was easy enough. I got an advance."

The vague answer seemed to satisfy her, and she rested her head against his shoulder and stroked the oranges with her free hand. "Well, that's just great. I guess they must think the world of you at the office," she said placidly.

Vance held her to him. After a pause he said: "I always felt sorry for the fellow, somehow."

Through her deep lashes she looked up, as though wondering a little. "Well, you don't have to any longer, do you?"

Vance felt as if she had moved away from him; but in reality her light body was pressed more closely to his. "Why, I don't know," he said, "I guess we didn't act any too square to him, apart from the money. I wish now we'd given him warning … or something … "

She gave a little wriggle of contentment. "Well, yes, I wish we had too; but I guess it was safer, the way we did it." For her, at least, the old score had been completely wiped out. He wondered, as he clasped her, if anyone would ever feel about the deep invisible things as he did.

To stifle conjecture he bent down and kissed her lids shut, one after the other. That funny lonely woman in the big house, who had imagined he was unhappily married …  !

Next morning the expressman deposited at the door a big basket with the "Storecraft" label, full of perfumed grapefruit and polished mandarins and boxes of Californian delicacies.

Chapter 5

Vance stopped short. It was three years since he had seen the Willows.