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NOTE XVII. Natalie

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Chapter 17, Natalie

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After the funeral, the family returned to the Fifth Avenue house.

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Though I took up a permanent abode elsewhere, my apartment was still there, and I came and went almost as one of the household.

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The more I saw of Natalie, the stranger and more distant she was.

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Her behavior was incomprehensible.

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She was friendly, often tender, always solicitous, but kept a wall of constraint between us.

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and Business.

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She positively refused to talk of our engagement and came to the point where she denied there

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was any such thing.

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When I proposed to cure that difficulty in a very obvious way, she took refuge in fits

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of perverse and willful unreasonableness.

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She would spend a whole evening in some inaccessible mood and become herself only for an instant

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at the last.

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Suddenly they resolved to travel.

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She persuaded her mother to it.

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When we won't see Coxie for a long, long time, she said, one evening at dinner, and maybe

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he will miss us.

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They went around the world.

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Her letters were friendly, sprightly, teasing, and very unsatisfactory.

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She would not be serious.

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At last, Galt's posthumous affairs began to settle so that I could leave them, and I immediately

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set out in a westerly direction, intending to meet Mrs. Galt and Natalie in the Orient

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on surprise.

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I missed them in China because they had revised their schedule and gone to Japan.

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In Japan, I missed them again because they were suddenly homesick and cut their sojourn

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shortly.

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We crossed the Pacific a week apart.

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They stopped only four days in San Francisco, so I missed them there.

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Then I telegraphed Natalie what I had been doing.

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Four months had passed without a word of news between us.

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When arriving in New York, I went directly to the Fifth Avenue house.

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As I rang the bell, a feeling of desolation assailed me.

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The absurd thought rose that she somehow knew of my pursuit and had purposely defeated it.

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She was downstairs, sitting alone before the fireplace in the reception hall, reading.

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She dropped her book and ran toward me, rather at me, slid the last ten feet of it with her

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The End