ome off as they could. He
asked if there were no cold drinks in the house, no lemonade, no iced
syrups; in such weather something of that sort ought always to be kept
going. When his mother remarked that surely at the club they _were_
going he went on, 'Oh, yes, I had various things there; but you know I
have walked down the hill since. One should have something at either
end. May I ring and see?' He rang while Mrs. Nettlepoint observed that
with the people they had in the house--an establishment reduced
naturally at such a moment to its simplest expression (they were
burning-up candle-ends and there were no luxuries) she would not answer
for the service. The matter ended in the old lady's going out of the
room in quest of syrup with the female domestic who had appeared in
response to the bell and in whom Jasper's appeal aroused no visible
intelligence.

She remained away some time and I talked with her son, who was sociable
but desultory and kept moving about the room, always with his fan, as if
he were impatient. Sometimes he seated himself for an instant on the
window-sill, and then I saw that he was in fact very good-looking; a
fine brown, clean young athlete. He never told me on what special
contingency his decision depended; he only alluded familiarly to an
expected telegram, and I perceived that he was probably not addicted to
copious explanations. His mother's absence was an indication that when
it was a question of gratifying him she had grown used to spare no
pains, and I fancied her rummaging in some close storeroom, among old
preserve-pots, while the dull maid-servant held the candle awry. I know
not whether this same vision was in his own eyes; at all events it did
not prevent him from saying suddenly, as he looked at his watch, that I
must excuse him, as he had to go back to the club. He would return in
half an hour--or in less. He walked away and I sat there alone,
conscious, in the dark, dismantled, simplified room, in the deep silence
that rests on American towns during the hot season (there was now and
then a far cry or a plash in the water, and at intervals the tinkle of
the bells of the horse-cars on the long bridge, slow in the suffocating
night), of the strange influence, half sweet, half sad, that abides in
houses uninhabited or about to become so--in places muffled and
bereaved, where the unheeded sofas and patient belittered tables seem to
know (like the disconcerted dogs) that it is the eve of