Simon blushed hotly. 'But, Lucy, you don't think religion is ham?'
Simon laughed too. How clever she was! 'But you know I never could believe in the Trinity and all that. And, what's more, I don't believe you do yourself.'
'It isn't exactly what one believes. I was baptized into the Church of England--I feel myself a member. Really, Sim, you are a dreadfully argumentative and quarrelsome person.'
'I'll never quarrel with you, Lucy,' he said half entreatingly; for somehow he felt a shiver of cold at the word 'baptized,' as though himself plunged into the font.
In this wise did both glide away from any deep issue or decision till the summer itself glided away. Mrs. Cohn, anxiously following the courtship through Sim's love-smitten eyes, her suggestion that the girl be brought to see her received with equal postponement, began to fret for the great thing to come to pass. One cannot be always heroically stiffened to receive the cavalry of communal criticism. Waiting weakens the backbone. But she concealed from her boy these flaccid relapses.
'You said you'd bring her to see me when she returned from the seaside,' she ventured to remind him.
'So I did; but now her father is dragging her away to Scotland.'
'You ought to get married the moment she gets back.'
'I can't expect her to rush things--with her father to square. Still, you are not wrong, mother. It's high time we came to a definite understanding between ourselves at least.'
'What!' gasped Mrs. Cohn. 'Aren't you engaged?'
'Oh, in a way, of course. But we've never said so in so many words.'
For fear this should be the 'English' way, Mrs. Cohn forbore to remark that the definiteness of the Sugarman method was not without compensations. She merely applauded Simon's more sensible mood.
But Mrs. Cohn was fated to a further season of fret. Day after day the 'fat letters' arrived with the Scottish postmark and the faint perfume that always stirred her own wistful sense of lost romance--something far-off and delicious, with the sweetness of roses and the salt of tears. And still the lover, floating in his golden mist, vouchsafed her no definite news.
One night she found him restive beyond his wont. She knew the reason. For two days there had been no scented letter, and she saw how he started at every creak of the garden-gate, as he waited for the last post. When at length a step was heard crunching on the gravel, he rushed from the room, and Mrs. Cohn heard the hall-door open. Her ear, disappointed of the rat-tat, morbidly followed every sound; but it seemed a long time before her boy's returning footstep reached her. The strange, slow drag of it worked upon her nerves, and her heart grew sick with premonition.