The buxom, vivacious brunette, Mrs. Edith Hamilton, was a neighbor of the Cochranes in this summer colony to the north of the Windy City. She had been a year earlier Edith Allison, one of the most delightful of Chicago’s debutantes of the season and certainly the wealthiest in her own right. For she and her brother, Herbert three years her senior, had already come into the vast estate of their late parents.
Edith herself had speedily succumbed to the sincere and powerful and quite disinterested addresses of Henry Hamilton-disinterested because Hamilton himself was a young man of more than considerable means. Rollicking and carefree, this youthful married pair were among the most ardent of the unconventional gambollers of the Michigan Dunes, as the colony had been dubbed by its builders and residents.
Herbert Allison owned a choice bungalow adjacent to that of his sister and her spouse. He had never thus far occupied it in the two years of community life here. But Edith was now gleefully announcing his approaching arrival from African and Asiatic wilds where he had been recently engaged in hunting, and of a genuine variety instead of prepared trips with scores of beaters and all the paraphernalia which young men of wealth are prone to surround themselves with on such expeditions.
Herbert arrived, and he proved to be-or seemed to be-almost as much out of the picture as had the shy Marion upon her arrival. He was very quiet, reticent about his adventures, visibly glad to find this one spot in America where not even his wealth would cast about him such a glamor as to make him something of a besieged public character and the target of aspiring matrons with marriageable daughters of greater or lesser charm.
Herbert Allison was dark of hair and eyes, like his sister, but a lithe and sinewy figure, instead of the somewhat buxom Edith. He was bronzed, taciturn, yet at the same time very pleasant in demeanor.
“Altogether a perfect dear. What a ‘rave’ for the girls, if only he weren’t so very retiring and bashful,” was the tenor of feminine comments to Edith concerning him. “Twenty-four now, did you say, and not hooked yet? Surprising that he has been allowed to escape unfettered. Yet I suppose his long trips have given the maidens little chance at him. Yet, some way, dear, he impresses one as so shy that he might well be regarded as indifferent to girls.”
In response to such comments upon her beloved brother, Edith Hamilton raised charming eyebrows with a wee smile which concealed silent dissent to some of the conclusions drawn concerning the tanned and sinewy youth who was her brother.
But not even the reputation of serene quiet and reserve with which Herbert was stamped by those given to first impressions could invalidate the fact that he proved speedily to be no wet blanket on the very informal minglings and frolics to which the colony was prone. If by no means boisterous in his ways, if inclined to be rather the smiling observer than the participant in fun which often arose to extreme pitches, he was quickly acquitted of disapproval of frivolity or of any desire to stem the tide of pleasure by frowns or withdrawal.
Strangely, or naturally-whichever it may seem-he and the beautiful Californian, Marion Stone, appeared drawn together. If the shyness of the boy was just a pleasant veneer over a nature which could, as some few in this world could have testified, become the reverse of retiring on occasions, the delicate sensibilities of the girl were, as we know, inbred. But by this time the maneuvers of Mildred and Stanley had accomplished the purpose of “launching” Marion. Even if the lovely Miss Stone could not bring herself to do in Michigan Dunes as the Michigan Dunians did in all respects, still she was one of them-and a very popular one.
It is probable that the very fact that she still manifested, despite the efforts of Mildred and Stanley to “toughen” her to the life of this lively set, a certain bashful reserve and modesty, played its part in making even the wildest of the colony member fond of her. She still represented, in their gatherings, the old-fashioned, demure point of view to an extent, and her blushes and widened eyes when she saw one or more of the young women calmly strip down their tenuous bathing suits to the navel, or lower in mixed company, for the purpose of allowing the sun’s rays to drench their pretty bodies, brought about a certain tenderly amused affection for her among even the most cynical of these young persons of wealth and standing. There was a certain piquancy in finding in their midst a youthful beauty who was capable of being shocked.
From the very outset of Herbert Allison’s entrance into the colony, it became evident to the most astute of observers that the reserved and quiet globe-trotter felt drawn to this maiden. Compared with most of her new friends, she was somewhat green and gauche in the frivolous frolics and often cynical chatter which these more sophisticated young people freely allowed themselves. Her little alarms, her quick flushes, her sudden silences while she strove for composure, her palpable efforts to be nothing of the wet blanket or the living reproof amid words and acts which often caused her great consternation, these things, coupled with her loveliness and grace, frequently drew the dark, pleasant gaze of the only person who was even quieter than she in all that little community.
He had a way of smiling at Marion without even looking at her, a faculty which his keen-eyed sister had no difficulty in noting, knowing him as she did. For, intercepting one of those rare and hardly noticeable smiles, headed apparently towards the horizon, on her brother’s otherwise imperturbable features, Edith found speedily that, even though Marion was looking anywhere save at Herbert, a faint flush and a response to that smile would involuntarily appear upon the face of the girl, as if, without looking at each other, they were conscious of a certain mystic and unacknowledged sympathy interchanged.
With a visible effort, Marion would compose her features then into as near a blank as she could contrive-still without a glance at the boy. Presently she would look about her a trifle sheepishly, as if fearing that the sudden queer thought of this bronzed Herbert which had obsessed her, and her involuntary response to it, might have attracted attention. And, after a bit, there would be casual but wondering glances of inspection between the two young strangers, as if to note whether what the one had felt had had any repercussion with the other.
Had not Edith Hamilton known otherwise, she would have more than suspected that these two, who had barely met, were in reality far from strangers, that already secret meetings and a secret understanding existed between them. No, if there had been a coup de foudre between this pair it had been launched from the clear sky.
Edith was pleased, touched, just a trifle sorrowful also. She had long ago accustomed herself to consider her only brother as immune to romance, even though by no means immune to the sudden flaring of animality in his usually controlled nature. She knew him like a book, and loved him very deeply. She was already immensely fond of Marion, too, but it was hard to visualize Herbert with a wife. And such a thought as matrimony in this instance would never have occurred to her had it not been for the strange, almost unconscious, complicity which seemed to exist between them.