The Driver by Garet Garrett - HTML preview

CHAPTER XVII

NATALIE

After the funeral the family returned to the Fifth Avenue house. Though I took up a permanent abode elsewhere, my apartment was still there, and I came and went almost as one of the household.

The more I saw of Natalie the stranger and more distant she was. Her behavior was incomprehensible. She was friendly, often tender, always solicitous, but kept a wall of constraint between us. She positively refused to talk of our engagement, and came to the point where she denied there was any such thing. When I proposed to cure that difficulty in a very obvious way she took refuge in fits of perverse and wilful unreasonableness. She would spend a whole evening in some inaccessible mood and become herself only for an instant at the last. Suddenly they resolved to travel. She persuaded her mother to it.

“Then we won’t see Coxey for a long, long time,” she said, one evening at dinner; “and maybe he will miss us.”

They went around the world. Her letters were friendly, sprightly, teasing, and very unsatisfactory. She would not be serious.

At last Galt’s posthumous affairs began to settle, so that I could leave them, and I immediately set out in a westerly direction, intending to meet Mrs. Galt and Natalie in the Orient on surprise. I missed them in China, because they had revised their schedule and gone to Japan. In Japan I missed them again because they were suddenly homesick and cut their sojourn short. We crossed the Pacific a week apart. They stopped only four days in San Francisco, so I missed them there. Then I telegraphed Natalie what I had been doing. Four months had passed without a word of news between us.

On arriving in New York I went directly to the Fifth Avenue house. As I rang the bell a feeling of desolation assailed me. The absurd thought rose that she somehow knew of my pursuit and had purposely defeated it.

She was downstairs, sitting alone before the fireplace in the reception hall, reading. She dropped her book and ran toward me, rather at me, slid the last ten feet of it with her head down, her arms flung wide, and welcomed me with a hearty hug.

“Are we?” I asked, holding her.

“Coxey, silly dear! All this time we have been.”

END