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“Didn’t you know him? That was Cromwell Biron,” she simpered. Although Lucy Ellen was forty and, in most respects, sensible, she could not help simpering upon occasion.

“Cromwell Biron,” repeated Cecily, in an emotionless voice. She took off her bonnet mechanically, brushed the dust from its ribbons and bows and went to put it carefully away in its white box in the spare bedroom. She felt as if she had had a severe shock, and she dared not ask anything more just then. Lucy Ellen’s blush had frightened her. It seemed to open up dizzying possibilities of change.

“But she promised–she promised,” said Cecily fiercely, under her breath.

While Cecily was changing her dress, Lucy Ellen was getting the tea ready in the little kitchen. Now and then she broke out into singing, but always checked herself guiltily. Cecily heard her and set her firm mouth a little firmer.

“If a man had jilted me twenty years ago, I wouldn’t be so overwhelmingly glad to see him when he came back–especially if he had got fat and bald-headed,” she added, her face involuntarily twitching into a smile. Cecily, in spite of her serious expression and intense way of looking at life, had an irrepressible sense of humor.

Tea that evening was not the pleasant meal it usually was. The two women were wont to talk animatedly to each other, and Cecily had many things to tell Lucy Ellen. She did not tell them. Neither did Lucy Ellen ask any questions, her ill-concealed excitement hanging around her like a festal garment.

Cecily’s heart was on fire with alarm and jealousy. She smiled a little cruelly as she buttered and ate her toast.

“And so that was Cromwell Biron,” she said with studied carelessness. “I thought there was something familiar about him. When did he come home?”

“He got to Oriental yesterday,” fluttered back Lucy Ellen. “He’s going to be home for two months. We–we had such an interesting talk this afternoon. He–he’s as full of jokes as ever. I wished you’d been here.”

This was a fib. Cecily knew it.

“I don’t, then,” she said contemptuously. “You know I never had much use for Cromwell Biron. I think he had a face of his own to come down here to see you uninvited, after the way he treated you.”

Lucy Ellen blushed scorchingly and was miserably silent.

“He’s changed terrible in his looks,” went on Cecily relentlessly. “How bald he’s got–and fat! To think of the spruce Cromwell Biron got to be bald and fat! To be sure, he still has the same sheepish expression. Will you pass me the currant jell, Lucy Ellen?”

“I don’t think he’s so very fat,” she said resentfully, when Cecily had left the table. “And I don’t care if he is.”

Twenty years before this, Biron had jilted Lucy Ellen Foster. She was the prettiest girl in Oriental then, but the new school teacher over at the Crossways was prettier, with a dash of piquancy, which Lucy Ellen lacked, into the bargain. Cromwell and the school teacher had run away and been married, and Lucy Ellen was left to pick up the tattered shreds of her poor romance as best she could.

She never had another lover. She told herself that she would always be faithful to the one love of her life. This sounded romantic, and she found a certain comfort in it.

She had been brought up by her uncle and aunt. When they died she and her cousin, Cecily Foster, found themselves, except for each other, alone in the world.

Cecily loved Lucy Ellen as a sister. But she believed that Lucy Ellen would yet marry, and her heart sank at the prospect of being left without a soul to love and care for.

It was Lucy Ellen that had first proposed their mutual promise, but Cecily had grasped at it eagerly. The two women, verging on decisive old maidenhood, solemnly promised each other that they would never marry, and would always live together. From that time Cecily’s mind had been at ease. In her eyes a promise was a sacred thing.