effortless grace and speed, and without moving an inch from his position, whirled off a dozen brilliant cartwheels that would have done credit to a circus tumbler.
He came gracefully, unweariedly erect again, to standing posture, amid an ovation of breathlessly uttered wonder, frank applause.
But now the time had come for parting: there was the sound of a motor in the drive before the house, in a moment a maid-servant came quietly out upon the terrace and informed Miss Telfair that her car had come. She gathered her evening cloak about her fragile, ivory shoulders—that were somehow like a piece of her own rare porcelain—thrust her hand out towards Mrs. Pierce in swift and firm farewell, and turned, saying in her crisp, incisive voice: “Well, children, I’m departing…. Joel,” she said, pausing a moment as she went, “I shall expect you and your young friend at my house for tea tomorrow.”
“And are you coming to the pool tomorrow morning, Margaret?” Mrs. Pierce called after her.
“That, my dear, I couldn’t tell you,” she said, going. “If I do not get a call from town. We shall see what we shall see—good night, all,” and she went through the moonlit door into the house.
LXI
Mrs. Pierce stood at the foot of the stairs surveying this young stranger from the outside world with a tolerant but glacially detached smile of impersonal curiosity:
“…. Joel tells me that you like to stay up all night and prowl around. What do you do on these prowling expeditions?”
He wanted to answer her with simple eloquence and grace and warmth, he wanted to paint a picture of his midnight wanderings that would hold her there in fascinated interest, but the glacial impersonality of the woman’s smile, the proud and haughty magnificence of her person, froze all the ardours of enthusiasm and conviction with which, he felt, he might have spoken; it even seemed to numb and thicken the muscles of his tongue, and he stood there gaping at her awkwardly, cutting a sorry figure, and flushing crimson with anger and vexation at his lame, stupid, halting tongue, and stammered out, replying:
“I—I walk,” he mumbled. “I—I take walks.”
“You—what?” she said kindly enough, but sharply, with a kind of peremptory authority that told him that she must already be growing weary and impatient of his stammering, incoherent
