But she looked, boldly this time, back into the eyes still frankly intent upon her. They did not seem to her hostile or resentful. Rather, Irene had the feeling that they were ready to smile if she would. Nonsense, of course. The feeling passed, and she turned away with the firm intention of keeping her gaze on the lake, the roofs of the buildings across the way, the sky, anywhere but on that annoying woman. Almost immediately, however, her eyes were back again. In the midst of her fog of uneasiness she had been seized by a desire to outstare the rude observer. Suppose the woman did know or suspect her race. She couldn’t prove it.
Suddenly her small fright increased. Her neighbour had risen and was coming towards her. What was going to happen now?
“Pardon me,” the woman said pleasantly, “but I think I know you.” Her slightly husky voice held a dubious note.
Looking up at her, Irene’s suspicions and fears vanished. There was no mistaking the friendliness of that smile or resisting its charm. Instantly she surrendered to it and smiled too, as she said: “I’m afraid you’re mistaken.”
“Why, of course, I know you!” the other exclaimed. “Don’t tell me you’re not Irene Westover. Or do they still call you ’Rene?”
In the brief second before her answer, Irene tried vainly to recall where and when this woman could have known her. There, in Chicago. And before her marriage. That much was plain. High school? College? Y.W.C.A. committees? High school, most likely. What white girls had she known well enough to have been familiarly addressed as ’Rene by them? The woman before her didn’t fit her memory of any of them. Who was she?
“Yes, I’m Irene Westover. And though nobody calls me ’Rene any more, it’s good to hear the name again. And you—” She hesitated, ashamed that she could not remember, and hoping that the sentence would be finished for her.
“Don’t you know me? Not really, ’Rene?”
“I’m sorry, but just at the minute I can’t seem to place you.”
Irene studied the lovely creature standing beside her for some clue to her identity. Who could she be? Where and when had they met? And through her perplexity there came the thought that the trick which her memory had played her was for some reason more gratifying than disappointing to her old acquaintance, that she didn’t mind not being recognized.
And, too, Irene felt that she was just about to remember her. For about the woman was some quality, an intangible something, too vague to define, too remote to seize, but which was, to Irene Redfield, very familiar. And that voice. Surely she’d heard those husky tones somewhere before. Perhaps before time, contact, or something had been at them, making them into a voice remotely suggesting England. Ah! Could it have been in Europe that they had met? ’Rene. No.
“Perhaps,” Irene began, “you—”
The woman laughed, a lovely laugh, a small sequence of notes that was like a trill and also like the ringing of a delicate bell fashioned of a precious metal, a tinkling.
Irene drew a quick sharp breath. “Clare!” she exclaimed, “not really Clare Kendry?”
So great was her astonishment that she had started to rise.
“No, no, don’t get up,” Clare Kendry commanded, and sat down herself. “You’ve simply got to stay and talk. We’ll have something more. Tea? Fancy meeting you here! It’s simply too, too lucky!”
“It’s awfully surprising,” Irene told her, and, seeing the change in Clare’s smile, knew that she had revealed a corner of her own thoughts. But she only said: “I’d never in this world have known you if you hadn’t laughed. You are changed, you know. And yet, in a way, you’re just the same.”
“Perhaps,” Clare replied. “Oh, just a second.”
She gave her attention to the waiter at her side. “M‑mm, let’s see. Two teas. And bring some cigarettes. Y‑es, they’ll be all right. Thanks.” Again that odd upward smile. Now, Irene was sure that it was too provocative for a waiter.
While Clare had been giving the order, Irene made a rapid mental calculation. It must be, she figured, all of twelve years since she, or anybody that she knew, had laid eyes on Clare Kendry.
After her father’s death she’d gone to live with some relatives, aunts or cousins two or three times removed, over on the west side: relatives that nobody had known the Kendry’s possessed until they had turned up at the funeral and taken Clare away with them.
For about a year or more afterwards she would appear occasionally among her old friends and acquaintances on the south side for short little visits that were, they understood, always stolen from the endless domestic tasks in her new home. With each succeeding one she was taller, shabbier, and more belligerently sensitive. And each time the look on her face was more resentful and brooding. “I’m worried about Clare, she seems so unhappy,” Irene remembered her mother saying. The visits dwindled, becoming shorter, fewer, and further apart until at last they ceased.
Irene’s father, who had been fond of Bob Kendry, made a special trip over to the west side about two months after the last time Clare had been to see them and returned with the bare information that he had seen the relatives and that Clare had disappeared. What else he had confided to her mother, in the privacy of their own room, Irene didn’t know.
But she had had something more than a vague suspicion of its nature. For there had been rumours. Rumours that were, to girls of eighteen and nineteen years, interesting and exciting.
There was the one about Clare Kendry’s having been seen at the dinner hour in a fashionable hotel in company with another woman and two men,
