For a little she kept her face hidden, shutting out the present, jealously living with the wonderful thing that had happened to her. It was as wonderful as anything she had dreamed might come when she had written him that letter. And if she needed any proof of his love, she had had it in the moment when he had let her go. There he had transcended her hope. She felt lifted up, she felt triumphant, though the triumph had not been hers. It was all his; he had saved her from her own weakness; his was the miracle. How he shone to her! The dark, swaying hollow of the carriage seemed still full of his presence, full of his hurried whispering; and again she seemed to see him standing outside the window in the deep blue evening holding out his hands to her cry of "I love you!"
He had been wonderful in a way she had not expected. He had shown her so beautifully that he could be reached in spite of his obsession. Might not she hope to touch him just a little further? Was there any height now that he might not rise to? She seemed to see the possible end of it all shaping itself out of his magnanimity. She seemed to see him finally relinquishing his passion for the jewel, and his passion for her for the sake of something finer than both. She had seen it foreshadowed in what he had done this day—having them both in his hands, he had put them away from him. Yet in that action she knew there had been no finality. She had touched him, but she had not convinced him, and as long as he was unconvinced he would be at her again in some other way.
Her hands dropped from her face, and she confronted the fact drearily. "No," she thought, "he never gives up what he wants."
She looked out of the window. The flickers of gas-lamps fell intermittently through it upon her. Her queer vehicle was rattling crazily—joltingas if every spring were at its last leap. She was out of the quiet, blue street. Montgomery Avenue, with its lights, its glittering gilt names and Latin insignia, was traveling by on either side of her. The voice of the city was growing louder in her ears, the crowd on the pavement increased. At intervals the carriage dipped through glares of electric lights that illuminated its interior in a flash broader than day—the ragged cushions, the raveled tassels, the limp-swinging shutters, and, glimmering in the midst, wild and disheveled, herself in all the little wavy mirrors. She sat looking out at the maze of moving lights and figures without seeing them, intent on an idea that was growing clearer, larger, moment by moment in her mind.
Kerr's appearance in her garden—his capture of her—had not been the fantastic freak it had seemed. He had had his purpose. He had taken her out of her environment; he had carried her beyond succor or menace just that he might carry them both so much further and faster through their differences. They had notreached the point of agreement yet, but might they not on some other ground, where they could be unchallenged? It seemed to her if she could only meet him on her own ground for once—instead of for ever on Clara's or Harry's—only meet him alone, somewhere beyond their reach, it might be accomplished, it might be brought to the end she so wished. Yet where to go to be rid of Clara and Harry, the two so closely associated with every fact of her life?
The hack, which had been moving along at a rapid pace, slowed now to a walk among the thickening traffic, and from a mere moving mass the crowd appeared as individuals—a stream of dark figures and white faces. Her eyes slipped from one to another. Here one stood still on the lamp-lit corner, looking down, with lips moving quickly and silently. It was strange to see those rapid, eager, moving lips with no sound from them audible. Then her eyes were startled by something familiar in the figure, though the direct down-glare of the ball of light above him distorted the features with shadows. She pressedher face against the window-glass in palpitating doubt. It was Harry.
She cowered in the corner of the carriage. In a moment the risks of her situation were before her. Had he seen her? Oh, no, at least not yet. He had been too intent on whomever he was talking to. She peered to make sure that he was still safely on the street corner. He was just opposite, and now that the eddy of the crowd had left a little clear space around him she saw with whom he was talking. It was a small, very small, shabby, nondescript man—possibly only a boy, so short he seemed. His back was toward her. His clothes hung upon him with an odd un-Anglo-Saxon air. He was foreign with a foreignness no country could explain—Italian, Portuguese, Greek—whatever he was, he was a strange foil to Harry, so bright and burnished.
The hack was turning. She realized with dismay that it was turning sharp around that very corner where they stood. Suppose Harry should chance to glance through its window and see Flora Gilsey sitting trembling within. Thehack wheezed and cramped, and all at once she heard it scrape the curb. Then she was lost! She looked up brave in her desperation, ready to meet Harry's eyes. She saw the back of his head. For a moment it loomed directly above her, then it moved. He was separating from his companion. With one stride he vanished out of the square frame of the window, and there remained full fronting her, staring in upon her, the face of his companion.
Back flashed to her memory the goldsmith's shop—dull hues and odors all at once—and that wide unwinking stare that had fixed her from the other side of the counter. The blue-eyed Chinaman! In the glare of white light, in his terrible clearness and nearness, she knew him instantly.
The hack plunged forward, the face was gone. But she remained nerveless, powerless to move, frozen in her stupefaction, while her vehicle pursued its crazy course. It was clattering up Sutter Street toward Kearney, where at this hour the town was widest awake, and thecrowd was a crowd she knew. At any instant people she knew might be going in and out of the florists' shops and restaurants, or passing her in carriages. And what of Flora Gilsey in her morning dress and garden hat, in a night-hawk of a Telegraph Hill hack, flying through their midst like a mad woman? They were the least of her fears. She had forgotten them. The only thing that remained to her was the memory of Harry and the blue-eyed Chinaman together on the street corner.
She had been given a glimpse of that large scheme that Harry was carrying forward somewhere out of her sight—such a glimpse as Clara had given her in the rifling of her room, as Ella had shown in her hysterical revelation. Again she felt the threat of these ominous signs of danger, as a lone general at a last stand with his troops clustered at his back sees in front, and behind, on either side of him, the glitter of bayonets in the bushes.
She was in the midst of the tangled traffic of Kearney Street. Swimming lights and crowdswere all around her. She peered forth cautiously upon it. She saw a florid face, a woman, she knew casually—and there her eyes fastened, not for the woman's brilliant presence, but for what she saw directly in front of it, thrown into relief upon its background—a short and shabby figure, foreign, equivocal, reticent, the figure of a blue-eyed Chinaman.
He was standing still while the crowd flowed past him. This time he was alone. He seemed to be waiting, yet not to watch, as if he had already seen what he was expecting and knew that it must pass his way. It was uncanny, his reappearance, at a second interval of her route, standing as if he had stood there from the first, patient, expectant, motionless. It was worse than uncanny.
All at once an idea, wild and illogical enough, jumped up in her mind. Couldn't this miserable vehicle that was lumbering like a disabled bug move faster and rattle her on out of reach of the glare, the publicity, the threat of discovery, and, above all, of her discomforting notion?She breathed out relief as the carriage dipped into the comparative quiet again, and she felt herself being driven on and up a gently rising street between block-apart, lone gas-lamps. She thrust her face as far out of the window as she dared, looking back at the lights and traffic which were drifting behind her. At this distance she could single out no one figure from the crowd, and no figure which could possibly be that of the blue-eyed Chinaman was moving up the street behind her. There only remained a disquieting memory of him on the corner with Harry. Together they made a combination, to her mind, threatening to the man she loved, for whom she so desperately feared.
If ever she had felt herself helpless, it was in this moment passing along the half-lit, half-empty city street. By what she knew, by what she wore around her neck, she was separated from all peace-abiding citizens—she was outlawed. Every closed door and shaded window (so many she had opened or looked out of!) now seemed shut and shaded against her for ever.Night and the reticent gray city, averting their eyes, let her slip through unregarded.
She was passing that section of large, old-fashioned mansions, cupolaed, towered, indistinct at the top of their high, broad steps, or back among the trees of their gardens. Along the front of one stretched a high hedge of laurestinas black as a ribbon of the night, capacious of shadows; and it seemed to Flora that all at once a shadow detached itself. She looked with a start. It flashed along the pavement—if shadow it were—running head down with a strange, scattering movement of arms and legs, yet seeming to make such speed that for a moment it kept abreast of the cab. She could see no features, no lineament of this strange thing to recognize, yet instantly she knew what it must be—what she had feared and thought impossible. She thrust her head far out and addressed the driver.
"Go as fast as you can, faster! and I'll give you twice what he gave you." The words rang so wildly to her own ears that she half expectedthe driver to peer down like an old bird of prey from his perch and demand her reason. But he made no sound or sign. It may have been that in his time he had heard even wilder requests than hers. He only sent his whip cracking forward to the ears of the lean horse, and the cab began to rattle like a mad thing.
Flora leaned back with a sigh of relief. The mere sensation of being borne along at such a rate, the sight of houses, lamp-posts, even people here and there, flitting away from the eye, unable to interrupt her course, or even to glimpse her identity, gave her a feeling of safety. The more she was getting into the residence part of the city, the more deserted the streets, the closer shut the windows of the houses, the more it seemed to her as if the night itself covered and abetted her flight. So swiftly she went it was only a wonder how the cab held together. She had never traveled more rapidly in her light and silent carriage. Now they whirled the corner and plunged at the steep rise of a cross street. Just above, over the crown of the hill, she saw the sky, moonless, blackish, spattered with stars. Then against it a little fluttering shape like a sentinel wisp—the only living thing in sight. It was incredible, impossible, horrible that he should be there, in front of her, waiting for her, who had driven so fast—too fast, it had seemed, for human foot to follow. By what unimaginable route had he traveled? She was ready to believe he had flown over the housetops. And above all other horrors, why was he pursuing her?
The carriage was abreast the Chinaman now, and immediately he took up his trot, for a little while keeping up, dodging along between light and shadow, presently falling behind. At intervals she heard the patter, patter, patter of his footsteps following; at intervals she lost the sound, and shadows would engulf the figure, and she would wait in a panic for its reappearance. For she knew it was there somewhere, on one side of the street or the other. But, oh, not to see it! To expect at any moment it might start up again—Heaven knew where, perhaps at her very carriage window. Herunconscious hand was doubled to a fist upon her breast, fast closed upon the sapphire.
With all her body braced, she leaned and looked far backward, and far forward, and now for a long time saw nothing. The distance was empty. The glare of arc-lights showed her the shadows of her own progress—the shadow of her vehicle shooting huge and misshapen now on the cobbles, now along a blank wall, wheels, body and driver, all lurching like one; now heaped on each other, now tenuously drawn out, now twisting themselves into shapes the mind could not account for. For here, whirling the corner, the carriage seemed to wave an arm, and now between the wheels, fast twinkling, she saw a pair of legs. She leaned and looked, so mesmerized with this grotesque appearance that it scarcely troubled her that all the way down the last long hill she knew it must be that a man was running at her wheel.
The warm lights of her house were just before her, offering succor, stiffening courage. It would be but a dash from the door of the cab toher own door. There was no second course, once the cab stopped. She felt that to lurk in its gloom would mean robbery, perhaps death. She thought without fear, but with an intense calculation. Her hand held the door at swing as the cab drew up. Before it should stop she must leap. She gathered her skirts and sprang—sprang clean to the sidewalk. The steps of her house rushed by her in her upward flight. Her bell pealed. She covered her eyes.
For the moment before Shima opened the door there was nothing but darkness and silence. She had never been so glad of anything in her life as of the kind, astute, yellow face he presented to her distressed appeal.
"Shima," she panted, "pay the cab; and if there's any one else there say that I'll call the police—no, no, send him away." There was no question or hesitation in Shima's obedience. Through the glass of the door she watched him descend upon his errand, until he disappeared over the edge of the illumination of the vestibule. She waited, dimly aware of voices goingon beyond the curtains of the drawing-room, but all her listening power was concentrated on the silence without—a silence that remained unbroken, and out of which Shima returned with the same imperturable countenance.
"He wants ten dollars."
"Oh, yes, give him anything," Flora gasped. If that was all the Chinaman had followed her for! But her relief was momentary, for instantly Shima was back again.
"I gave him ten dollars, the cabman."
Now she gasped indeed. "Oh, the cabman! But the other one!" For an instant Shima seemed to hesitate; glancing past her shoulder as if there was something that he doubted behind her. Then as she still hung on his answer he brought it out in a lowered voice.
"Madam, there was no one else there."
With her hand at her distressed forehead she turned, and saw, between the curtains of the drawing-room, Harry, and behind him Clara, looking out at her with faces of amazement, and she fancied, horror. Harry came straight for her.
"Why, you poor child, what's happened to you?"
She gave him a look. She couldn't forget their scene in the red room, but the mixture of apprehension and real concern in his face went far toward melting her. She might even have told him something, at least a part of the truth, but for that other standing watching her from the drawing-room door. With Clara, there was nothing for it but to ignore her disordered hair,her hat in her hand, her ruffle torn and trailing on the floor.
She put on a splendid nonchalance, as if it were none of their business. "Oh, I am sorry if I kept you waiting."
It was Clara who spoke to her, past Harry's blank astonishment. "Why, we don't mind waiting a few moments more while you dress."
"I shan't have to dress." Such a statement Flora felt must amaze even Shima, waiting like an image on the threshold of the dining-room. But if these people were waiting to be amazed she felt herself equal to amazing them to the top of their expectations.
"Oh, but at least go up and let Marrika give you some pins," Clara protested, hurrying forward as if fairly to drive her.
"Thank you, no, this will do," Flora said. On one point she was quite clear. She wasn't going to leave those two together for a moment to discuss her plight; not till she could first get at Harry alone. Then and there she turned to the mirror and with her combs began to catchback and smooth the disorder of her hair, seeing all the while Clara's reflection hovering perturbed and vigilant in the background of her own.
While her hands were busy seeming to accommodate Clara, her mind was marshaled to Clara's outwitting. The only thing to do was to tell nothing. Let Clara spend her time in guessing. Unless by some wild chance she had seen Kerr in the garden she couldn't come near the truth of what had happened. But what was to be done with Harry? Harry was too close to her to be ignored. Her attitude toward him had undergone a change. In the moment in the red room, when she had seen him break the one feeling that had held her to him, the feeling of awe and respect had evaporated. She felt that it was quite impossible now for them to go on on the same footing; yet, as long as she kept the sapphire she must somehow manage to keep up an appearance of it. She must tell him something.
At that dreadful dinner, where she sat a conscious frustrater of these two silent ones, glancing at Harry's face, she knew that if she didn't attack she would be attacked by him. It was here in the midst of the noiseless passings of Shima, watching Harry's suspicious glances flashing across the table at her strange disorder, that the idea occurred to her of a way out of it. She was bold enough to try a daring thrust at the mystery. If ever a hunter was to be led off on a false scent, Harry was that one. She was amazed at the sudden, fearless impulse that had sprung up in her. She wasn't even afraid to say to him under Clara's nose, "Harry, I want you to myself after dinner. Come up into the garden study."
He was very willing to follow her. She thought she detected in his alacrity something more than curiosity or concern. It seemed almost as if Harry was ashamed of that scene in the red room, and anxious to make it up with her. He even tried before they had reached the head of the stairs. "Oh, Flora—I say, Flora, I—"
But an explanation between them was the last thing she wanted just then. She fairly ran, leaving him panting in the wake of her airy skirts.
For the first time since the thing began Clara was left out completely. Flora knew she was even left out of a possibility of listening at the keyhole. For the bright, tight, little room into which Harry followed her was approached by a square entry and a double door. The room itself overhung the garden as a ship's deck overhangs the sea. Leather books and long red curtains were the note of it. She and Harry had often been here together before. Harry had made love to her here, and she had found it pleasurable enough. But the fact that she could recall it now with distaste made this familiar surrounding seem strange, and they themselves strangest of all.
He hadn't got his breath. He had hardly shut the door on them before she began. "Well, something has happened." She had his attention. His other purpose was arrested. "Oh,something extraordinary. I would have told you on the spot, only I thought you would rather Clara didn't know it."
"I?" That left him staring. "What have I to do with it?"
At this she gave him a long look. "It was through you he ever had the chance of seeing me. I mean the blue-eyed Chinaman. He has followed me all the evening. He followed me here to the very door." Flora's array of facts fell so fast, so hard, so pointed, that for a moment they held him speechless in the middle of the room.
Any fleeting suspicion she might have had of his complicity in the Chinaman's pursuit vanished. He showed plain bewilderment. For a moment he was more at sea than herself. The next she saw the shadow of a thought so disturbing that it sharpened his ruddy face to harshness. He stepped toward her. "What did he say to you?" He loomed directly above her, threatening.
"Nothing. He didn't say anything. But Iknow he followed me quite to the house, for I saw his shadow all the way down the hill."
Harry still breathed quickly. "Where—how did he come across you?"
She'd been prepared for that question.
"I was driving down Sutter Street and he saw me at the carriage window."
Harry stood tense, poised, catching everything as she tossed it off; then as if all at once he felt the full weight of the burden, "Lord!" he said, and let himself down heavily into a chair. It was plain in his helpless stare that he knew exactly what it all meant. Laying her hands on the high chair-arms, leaning down so that she could look into his face, Flora made her thrust.
"What do you think he wants?" she gently asked. It was as if she would coax it out of him. His answer was correspondingly low and soft.
"It's that damned ring."
She heard her secret fear spoken aloud with such assurance that she waited, certain at the next moment Harry's voice would people the silence with all the facts that had so far escaped her. But when, after a moment of looking before him he did speak, he went back to the beginning, which they both knew.
"You know he didn't want to part with it in the first place."
"Yes, yes; but he did," Flora insisted.
"Well," he answered quickly, "but that was before—" He caught himself and went on with a scarcely perceptible break: "He may have had a better offer for it since."
He couldn't have put it more mildly, and yet that temperate phrase brought back to her in a flash a windy night full of raucous voices and the great figures in the paper that had covered half a page—the reward for the Crew Idol. Could it be that—that sum so overwhelming to human caution and human decency which Harry had cloaked by his grudging phrase "some better offer"? What else could he mean? And what else could the blue-eyed Chinaman mean by his strange pursuit of her?
"Some one must have wanted it awfully,"Flora tried again, keeping step with his mild admission.
Harry covered her with an impressive stare. "There's something queer about that ring," he nodded to her. He was going to tell her at last! She gazed at him in expectation, but presently she realized that nothing more was coming. He had stopped at the beginning. She tried to urge him on.
"Queer, what do you mean?" She was feigning surprise.
He looked at her cautiously. "Why, you must have noticed it yourself when we were at the shop. And now, to-night, his having followed you."
She could see him hesitate, choosing his words. She knew well enough her own fear of saying too much—but, what was Harry afraid of? Did he suspect her feeling for Kerr? Was that why he was holding back, leaving out, giving her the small, expurgated version of what he knew. She tried again, making it plainer.
"You think the ring is something he oughtnot to have had; something that belongs somewhere else?"
He looked away from her, around the room, as if to pick up his answer from some of the corners. "Well, anyway, it's lucky we waited about that setting," he said with quick irrelevance. "If you're going to be annoyed in this way you'd better let me have it."
Why hadn't she thought of that! It was what any man might say, after hearing such a story as hers, yet it was the last thing she had thought of, and the last thing she wanted.
"Oh, leave it with me," she quavered, "at least till you're sure!"
"Oh, no!" He gave his head a quick, decided shake. "If something should come out you wouldn't want to be mixed up in it."
"Then why not give it back to the Chinaman?" she tried him.
"Oh, that's ridiculous." He was in a passion. His darkening eyes, his swelling nostrils, his aspect so out of proportion to her mild and almost playful suggestion, frightened her. Hesaw it and instantly his mood dropped to mere irritation. "Oh, Flora, don't make a scene about it. This thing has been on my mind for days—the thought that you had the ring. I was afraid I had no business to let you have it in the first place, and what you've told me to-night has clean knocked me out. I don't know what I'm saying. Come, let me have it; and if there's anything queer about the business, at least we'll get it cleared up."
But, smiling, she retreated before him.
"Why, Flora," he argued, half laughing, but still with that dry end of irritation in his voice, "what on earth do you want to keep the thing for?"
By this time she backed against the window, and faced him. "Why, it's my engagement ring."
He looked at her. She couldn't tell whether he was readiest to laugh or rage.
"You gave it to me for that," she pleaded. "Why shouldn't I keep it, until you give me a real reason for giving it up? If you really knowanything, why don't you tell me?" She was sure she had him there; but he burst out at last:
"Well, for a fact, I know it is stolen!" He leaned toward her; and his arms, still flung out with the hands open as argument had left them, seemed to her frightened eyes all ready for her, ready with his last argument, his strength.
Once before she had feared herself face to face with the same threat in the eyes and body of another man, but here, her only fear was lest Harry should get the sapphire away from her. His doing so would dash down no ideal of him. It was mere physical terror that made her tremble and raise her hand to her breast. Instantly she saw how she had betrayed the sapphire again. He had taken hold of her wrist, and, twist as she might, he held it, horribly gentle.
She pressed back against the glass until she felt it hard behind her.
"Harry," she whispered, "if you care anything, if you ever want me for yours, you'll take your hands away." She meant it; she wassincere in that moment, for all she shrank from him. Her body and mind would not have been too great a price to give him for the sapphire.
But these he seemed to set aside as trivial. These he expected as a matter of course; he was going to have that other thing, too—the thing she had clung to as a man clings to life; and that now, parting from, she would give up not without a struggle as sharp as that with which the body gives up breath. She wrestled. He seemed all hands. He put aside her struggles, her pleadings, as if they were thistle-down.
Then all at once she felt his arm around her neck. She couldn't move her body. She could only turn her head from his hot breath. For a moment he held her, and yet another moment; and then, terrified at what this strange immobility might mean, she raised her eyes and saw he was not looking at her. Though he held her fast he was not conscious of her. Straight over her head he looked, through the window and down, into the garden. Her eyes followed. It lay beneath, the wonder of its morning aspect allblanched and dim. She saw the silhouette of rose branches in black on the sky. She saw the flowers and bushes all one dull tone. But in the midst of them the oval of the path shone white; and there, as in the afternoon, standing, looking upward, was the dark figure of a man.
Her heart gave a great leap. Just so she'd been summoned once before that day, but what infernal freak had fetched him back to repeat that dangerous sally, and brought him finally into his enemy's grasp? She tried to make a gesture to warn him, and just there Harry released her, dropped her so that she half fell upon the window-seat, and made a dash across the room for the light. In a moment they were in darkness. In a moment, to Flora pressed against the window, the garden sprang clear, and on the formless figure below the face appeared, white in the starlight looking up. She cried out in wonder. It was not Kerr. It was the blue-eyed Chinaman.
After her haunted drive, after her escape, after Shima's search, he was there, still inexorably there; small, diminished by the great façade of the house, but looking up at it with his calm eye, surveying it, measuring its height, numbering its doors, trying its windows. Harry was beside her again. He was tugging frantically at the window. It resisted. She saw his hands trembling while he wrestled with it. Then it went shrieking up and he leaned out.
"What do you want?" he called, and, though he used no name, Flora saw he knew with whom he was speaking. The Chinaman stood immobile, lifting his round, white face, whose mouth seemed to gape a little. Harry leaned far out and lowered his voice.
"Go away, Joe! Don't come here; never come here!" There was a quiver in his voice. Anger or apprehension, or both, whatever his passion was, for the moment it overwhelmed him, and as the Chinaman stood unmoved, unmoving, at his commands, Harry turned sharp from the window and dashed out of the room. Flora heard him running, running down the stairs. She hung there breathless, waiting tosee him meet the motionless figure; but while she looked and waited that motionless figure suddenly took life. It moved, it turned, it flitted, it mixed with shadows, became a shadow; and then there was nothing there.
Nothing was there when Harry burst out of the garden door and stood staring in the empty oval. How distracted, how violent he looked, balked of his prey! He was stalking the garden, beating the bushes, walking up and down. All at once he stopped and raised a white baffled face to her window. She shrank away.Shewas in peril of Harry now. He knew her no longer innocent. She had held the ring against him in the face of the fact he had told her it was stolen. And he must guess her motive. He must suspect her now.
In her turn she ran, up and up a twisted side stair, shortest passage to her own rooms. At least lock and key could keep her safe for the next few hours. After that she must think of something else.
By five o'clock in the morning she was already moving softly to and fro, so softly as not to rouse the sleeping Marrika. By seven her lightest bag was packed, herself was bathed, brushed, dressed even to hat and gloves, and standing at her window with all the listening alert look of one in a waiting-room expecting a train. She was watching for the city to begin to stir; watching for enough traffic below in the streets to make her own movement there not too noticeable. Yet every moment she waited she was in terror lest her fate should take violent form at last and assail her in the moment of escape. She listened for a foot ascending to her room with a message from Clara demanding an audience. She listened for the peal of the electric bell under Harry's hasty hand—Harry, arrived even at this unwarranted hour with Heaven knew what representative of law to force the sapphire from her.
But all her household was still unstirring when at last she went, soft step after step, down the broad and polished stair and across the empty hall. She went quiet, direct, determined, not at all as she had fled on her other perilous enterprise only yesterday. She shut the outer door after her without a sound and with great relief breathed in the fresh and faintly smoky air of morning.
She walked quickly. The windows of her house still overlooked her, and her greatest terror was that some voice, some appearance, out of that house, might command her return. The street was nearly empty. A maid scrubbing down steps looked after her sharply, and she wondered if she had been recognized. She had no intention of keeping to this street, or even taking a car and traveling down its broad, grayand gleaming vista of formal houses and formal gardens that she knew and that knew her so well. It was a cross-town car bound for quite another locality that she climbed aboard. It was filled only with mechanics and workmen with picks and shovels. She sat crowded elbow to elbow among odors of stale tobacco, stale garlic, stale perspiration, and looking straight before her through the car window watched the aspect of the city, still gray, grow less gleaming and formal and finally quite dirty, and quite, quite dull.
This was all as she had intended, very much in the direction of her errand, and safe. But in Market Street the car-line ended, and she was turned out again in this broad artery of commerce where she was in danger of meeting at any moment people she knew. She made straight across the thoroughfare to its south side, turned down Eighteenth and in a moment was hidden in Mission Street.
Now really the worst danger of detection was over. She saw no reason why a woman witha small hat and a hand-bag should not pass for a school-teacher. Indeed, the men did let her go at that, but the women—women with shawls over their heads, and women with uncovered heads and ear-rings in their ears, and thin, weak-eyed women with bags in their hands—the teachers themselves, one of whom she hoped to pass for—all stared at her. It didn't matter much, she thought, whether they thought her queer or not since they couldn't stop her.
She went, glancing at windows as she passed, looking for a place where she could go to breakfast. She turned into the first restaurant that offered, and after a hasty glance around it to be sure no one lurked there that might betray her she subsided into the clatter with relief. It was one more place to let time pass in, for it would be full two hours before she could fulfil her errand. She stayed as long as she dared, drinking two cups of the hideous coffee; stayed while many came and went, until she felt the proprietor noticing her. That revived her consciousness of the possible dangers still betweenher and the end she held in view. She had heard of people being arrested for suspicious conduct. She didn't feel sure in what this might consist, but surely such an appearance could be avoided by walking fast and seeming to know exactly where one was going.
It was ten o'clock in the morning, three hours since she had left her house and a most reasonable time of daylight, when Flora turned out of the flatness of "south of Market Street" and began to mount a slow-rising hill. It was a wooden sidewalk she followed flanking a wood-paved street, and these, with the wooden fences and dusty cypress hedges and the houses peering over them upon her looked worn, battered and belonging all to the past. None the less it bore traces of having been a dignified past, and farther up on the crown of the hill among deep-bosomed trees, two or three large mansions wore the gravely triumphant aspect of having been brought successfully from a past empire into a present with all their traditions and mahogany complete. Upward toward these Florawas looking. Her breath was short from fast climbing. Her cheeks under her thin veil were hot and bright.
As she neared the hilltop she glanced at a card from her chatelaine, consulting the address upon it. Then anxiously she scanned the house-fronts. It was not this one, nor this; but the square white mansion she came to now stood so far retired at the end of its lawn that she could not make out the number. As she peered a young girl came down the steps between the dark wings of the cypress hedge, a slim, fair, even-gaited creature dressed for the street and drawing on her gloves. As she passed Flora made sure she had seen her before. There was something familiar in the carriage of the girl's head and hands; something also like a pale reflection of another presence. Pale as it was, it was enough to reassure her that this was the house she wanted.
She ascended the steps beneath the arch of cypress and immediately found herself entering an atmosphere quieter even than that of the littlestreet below. It was quiet with the quiet of protectedness, as if some one brooding, vigilant care encircled it, defending it against all inroads of violent action and thought. It had been long since any young girl had carried such a heart of passionate hopes and fears up this mossed path between these peaceful flower-beds.
This appearance of the place began to bring before Flora the full enormity and impertinence of her errand, but though her heart beat on her side as loud as the brass knocker upon the door, she had no mind for turning back.
A high, cool, darkly gleaming interior, mellow with that precious tint of time which her own house so lacked, received her. And here, as well as out of doors, all the while she sat waiting she felt that protected peace was still the deity of the place. To Flora's eager heart time was streaming by, but the tall clock facing her measured it out slowly. Its longest golden finger had pointed out five minutes before the sweeping of a skirt coming down the hall brought her to her feet.
Mrs. Herrick came in hatless, a honeysuckle leaf caught in her gray crown of hair, geraniums in her hand. Flora had never seen her so informal and so gay.
"I would have asked you to come out into the garden, except that it's so wet, and there's no place to sit," she said.
Flora apologized. "I knew if I came at this hour I should interrupt you, but really there was no help for it." She glanced down at her satchel. "I had to go this morning, and before I went I had to see you about the house. I'm going down to look at it and—and to stop a while."
Mrs. Herrick hesitated, deprecated. "But you know Mrs. Britton wasn't satisfied with the price I asked."
"Oh," said Flora promptly, "but I shall be perfectly satisfied with it, and I want to take possession at once."
The positive manner in which she waved Clara out of her way brought up in Mrs. Herrick's face a faint flash of surprise; but it was gone in an instant, supplanted by her questioning puzzled consideration of the main proposition.
"Oh, I hope you haven't come to tell me you want it changed," she protested. "You know it's quite absurd in places—quite terrible indeed. It's 1870 straight through, and French at that; but even such whims acquire a dignity if they've been long cherished. You couldn't put in or take out one thing without spoiling the whole character."
"But I don't want to change it, I want it just as it is," Flora explained. "It isn't about the house itself I've come, it's about going down there. You see there are—some people, some friends of mine. I haven't promised them to show the house, but I have quite promised myself to show it to them, and they are only here for a few days more. They are going immediately." She was looking at Mrs. Herrick all the while she was telling her wretched lie, and now she even managed to smile at her. "I thought how lovely it would be if you could go there with me. I should like so very much to be init first with you, to have you go over it with me and tell me how to take care of it, as it's always been done. I should hate to do it any disrespect."
Her hostess smiled with ready answer. "Of course I will go down. I should be glad, but it must be in a day or two. Indeed, perhaps it would be better for you to have your people first, and I can come down, say Monday afternoon or Tuesday."
Flora faced this unexpected turn of the matter a little blankly. "Ah, but the trouble is I can't go down alone."
It was Mrs. Herrick's turn to look blank. "But Mrs. Britton?"
"Mrs. Britton isn't going with me; she can't."
"I see." Mrs. Herrick with a long, soft scrutiny seemed to be taking in more than Flora's mere words represented. "And you wouldn't put it off until she can?"
"I couldn't put it off a moment," Flora ended with a little breathless laugh. "I do so wishyou would come down with me this morning, for I must go, and you see I can't go alone."
Mrs. Herrick, sitting there, composed, in her cool, flowing, white and violet gown with the red flowers in her lap, still looked at Flora inquiringly. "But aren't there some women in your party old enough to make it possible and young enough to take pleasure in it?"
Flora shook her head. "Oh, no," she said. Her house of cards was tottering. She could not keep up her brave smiling. She knew her distress must be plain. Indeed, as she looked at Mrs. Herrick she saw the effect of it. Gaiety still looked at her out of that face, but the warmth, the spontaneity were gone; and the steady eyes, if anything so aloof could be suspicious, surely suspected her.
Her heart sank. If only she had told the truth—even so much of it as to say there was something she could not tell. What she had said was unworthy not only of herself but of the end she was so desperately holding out for. Now in the lucid gaze confronting her she knewall her intentions were taking on a dubious color, stained false, like her words, under the dark cloud of her own misrepresentation. Yet they were not false, she knew. Her motives, the end she was struggling for, were as austere as truth itself. She could not give up without one bold stroke to clear them of this accusation.
"Do you think there's anything queer about it?" she faltered.
"Queer?" To Flora's ears that sounded the coldest word she had ever heard. "I hardly think I understand what you mean."
"I mean is it that you think there's more in what I'm asking of you than I have said?" The two looked at each other and before that flat question Mrs. Herrick drew back a little in her chair.
"I have no right to think about it at all," she said.
"Well, there is," Flora insisted. "There's a great deal more. I am sorry. I should have told you, but I was afraid. I don't know whyI was afraid of you, except that in this matter I've grown afraid of every one. It's true that there may be people going down—at least, a person. But it isn't, as I let you think it, a house party at all. It's for something, something that I can't do any other way—something," she had a sudden flash of insight, "that, if I could tell you, you would believe in, too."
Mrs. Herrick's look had faded to a mere concentrated attention. "You mean that there is something you wish to do for whoever is going down?"
"Oh, something I must do," Flora insisted.
Mrs. Herrick considered a moment. "Why can't he do it for himself?" she threw out suddenly.
It made Flora start, but she met it gallantly. "Because he won't. I shall have to make him."
"You!" For a moment Flora knew that she was preposterous in Mrs. Herrick's eyes—and then that she was pathetic. Her companion was looking at her with a sad sort of humor."My dear, are you sure that that is your responsibility?"
Flora's answering smile was faint. "It seems as strange to me as it seems absurd to you, but I think I have done something already."
"Are you sure, or has he only let you think so? We have all at some time longed, or even thought it was our duty, to adjust something when it would have been safer to have kept our hand off," Mrs. Herrick went on gently.
"Oh, safer," Flora breathed. "Oh, yes; indeed, I know. But if something had been put into your hands without your choice; if all the life of some one that you cared about depended on you, would you think of beingsafe?" Flora, leaning forward, chin in hand, with shining eyes, seemed fairly to impart a reflection of her own passionate concentration to the woman before her.
Mrs. Herrick, so calm in her reposeful attitude, calm as the old portrait on the wall behind her, none the less began to show a curious sparkle of excitement in her face. "If I weresure that person's lifediddepend on me," she measured out her words deliberately. "But that so seldom happens, and it is so hard to tell."
"But if you were sure, sure, sure!" Flora rang it out certainly.
Mrs. Herrick in her turn leaned forward. "Ah, even then it would depend on him. And do you think you can make a man do otherwise than his nature?"
"You think I should fail?" Flora took it up fearlessly. "Well, if I do, at least I shall have done my best. I shall have to have done my best or I can never forgive myself."
"I see," Mrs. Herrick sighed. "But it sounds to me a risk too great for any reward that could come of its success." She thought. "If you could tell me more." Then, as Flora only looked at her wistfully and silently: "Isn't there some one you can confide in? Not Mrs. Britton?"
"Clara? Oh, no; never!" Flora startled Mrs. Herrick with the passionate repudiation.
"But could not Mr. Cressy—" and with thatbroken sentence several things that Mrs. Herrick had been keeping back looked out of her face.
Flora answered with a stare of misery. "I know what you must be thinking—what you can not help thinking," she said, "that the whole thing is unheard-of—outrageous—especially for a girl so soon to—to be—" She caught her breath with a sob, for the words she could not speak. "But there is nothing in this disloyal to my engagement, even though I can not speak of it to Harry Cressy; and nothing I hope to gain for myself by what I am trying to do. If I succeed it will only mean I shall never see him—the other one—again."
Mrs. Herrick rose, in her turn beseeching. "Oh, I can't help you go into it! It is too dubious. My dear, I know so much better than you what the end may mean."
"I know what the end may mean, and I can't keep out of it."
"But I can not go with you." There was a stern note in Mrs. Herrick's voice.
Flora looked around the room, the sunny windows, the still shadows, the tall, monotonous clock, as if this were the last glimpse of peace and protection she would ever have. She rose and put out her hand.
"I'm afraid I didn't quite realize how much I was asking of you. You have been very good even to listen to me. It's right, I suppose, that I should go alone."
Mrs. Herrick looked at her in dismay. "But that is impossible!" Then, as Flora turned away, she kept her hand. "Think, think," she urged, "how you will be misunderstood."
"Oh, I shall have to bear that—from the people who don't know."
"Yes, and even from the one for whom you are spending yourself!"
Flora gave her head a quick shake. "He understands," she said.
"My dear, he is not worth it."
Flora turned on her with anger. "You don't know what he is worth to me!"
Mrs. Herrick looked steadily at this unanswerable argument. Her hold on Flora's hand relaxed, but she did not quite release it. Her brows drew together. "You are quite sure you must go?"
Flora nodded. She was speechless.
"Did Mrs. Britton know you were coming to me?"
"No. She doesn't even know that I am going out of town. She must not," Flora protested.
"Indeed she must. You must not place yourself in such a false position. Write her and tell her you are going to San Mateo with me."
"Oh, if you would!" Tears sprang to Flora's eyes. "But will you, even if I can't tell you anything?"
"I shall not ask you anything. Now write her immediately. You can do it here while I am getting ready."
She had taken authoritative command of the details of their expedition, and Flora willingly obeyed her. She was still trembling from the stress of their interview, and she blinked backtears before she was able to see what she was writing.
It had all been brought about more quickly and completely than she had hoped, but it was in her mind all the while she indited her message to Clara, that Kerr, for whom it had been accomplished, was not yet informed of the existence of the scheme, or the part of guest he was to play. Yet she was sure that if she asked he would be promptly there. She wrote to him briefly:
At San Mateo, at the Herricks'. I want you there to-night. I have made up my mind.
At San Mateo, at the Herricks'. I want you there to-night. I have made up my mind.
As she was sealing it she started at a step approaching in the hall. She had wanted to conceal that betraying letter before Mrs. Herrick came back. She glanced quickly behind her, and saw standing between the half-open folding doors, the slim figure of a girl—slimmer, younger even than the one who had passed her at the gate, but like her, with the same large eyes, the same small indeterminate chin. Just at the chin the likeness to Mrs. Herrick failedwith the strength of her last generation—but the eyes were perfect; and they gazed at Flora wondering. With the sixth sense of youth they recognized the enactment of something strange and thrilling.
Another instant and Mrs. Herrick's presence dawned behind her daughter—and her voice—"Why, child, what are you doing there?"—and her hands seemed apprehensive in their haste to hurry the child away, as if, truly, in this drawing-room, for the first time, something was dangerous.
The day which had dawned so still and gloomy was wakening to something like wildness, threatening, brightening, gusty, when they stepped out of the train upon the platform of the San Mateo station. Clouds were piling gray and castle-like from the east up toward the zenith, and dark fragments kept tearing off the edges and spinning away across the sky. But between them the bright face of the sun flashed out with double splendor, and the thinned atmosphere made the sky seem high and far, and all form beneath it clarified and intense.
There upon the narrow platform Mrs. Herrick hesitated a moment, looking at Flora. "What train do you want to meet?" she asked.
Flora stood perplexed. "I hardly know. You see I can't tell how soon my letter would reach—would be received."
"Then we would better meet them all," the elder woman decided.
They drove away into the face of the wet, fresh wind and flying drops of rain. Flora, leaning back in the carriage, looked out through the window with quiet eyes. The spirited movement of the sky, the racing of its shadows on the grass, the rolling foliage of the trees, seen tempestuous against flying cloud, were alike to her consoling and inspiring. She had never felt so free as now, driving through the fitful weather, nor so safe as with this companion who was sitting silent by her side. She was driving away from all her complications. She was retreating to a fresh stronghold, where her conflict would be a duel hand to hand, and where the outside forces, which had harassed her and threatened ignobly to down her antagonist with a stab in the back, could be held at bay.
Already she was looking toward the housewhich she had never seen as her own kindly castle; and the generous opening of its gate—old granite crowned with rose of sharon—did not disappoint her. The house was hidden in the swelling trees, but the drive winding beneath them gave glimpses through of lawns, of roses wreathing scarletly the old gray fountain basin, of magnolia and acacia, doubly delicate and white and fragile beneath the thunderous sky.
The house, when finally it loomed upon them, with its irregular roofs topped by curious square turrets, with its tremendous ground floor rambling away in wings on every side, with its deep upper and lower verandas, looked out upon by a multitude of long French windows, seemed too large, too strangely imposing for a structure of wood. But whatever of original ugliness had been there was hidden now under a splendid tapestry of vines, and Flora, looking up at the rose and honeysuckle that panoplied its front, felt her throat swell for sheer delight.
For a moment after they had left the carriage they stood together in the porte-cochère,looking around them. Then half wistfully, half humorously, Mrs. Herrick turned to Flora. "I do hope you won't want to buy it!"
"Oh, I'm afraid I shall," Flora murmured, "that is, if—" She left her sentence hanging, as one who would have said "if I come out of this alive," and Mrs. Herrick, with a quick start of protection, laid her hand on Flora's arm.
"If you must," she said lightly, "if you do buy it, then at least I shall know it is in good hands."
Flora gave her a look of gratitude, not so much for the slight kindness of her words as for the great kindness of her attitude in thus so readily resuming the first assumption on which her presence there had been invited. That was the house itself.
It was plain to Flora from the moment she set foot over the threshold that the house was to be no mean ally of theirs, but Mrs. Herrick was making it help them doubly in their hard interval of waiting. Alone together with unspoken, unspeakable things between them—thingsthat for mere decency or honor could not be uttered—with nothing but these to think of, nothing but each other to look at, they must yet, in sheer desperation and suspense, have inevitably burst out with question or confession, had not the great house been there to interpose its personality. And the way Mrs. Herrick was making the most of that! The way immediately, even before she had shown anything, she began to revivify the spirit of the place, as the two women stood with their hats not yet off in the room that was to be Flora's, talking and looking out upon the lawn!
With her silences, with her expressive self as well as with her words, Mrs. Herrick was reanimating it all the while they lunched and rested, still in the upper-rooms overlooking the garden. And later, when they made the tour of the house, she began unwinding from her memory incidents of its early beginnings, pieces of its intimate, personal history, as one would make a friend familiar to another friend. And these past histories and the rooms themselves were leadingFlora away out of her anxious self, were soothing her prying apprehensions, were giving her a detachment in the present, till what she so anticipated lay quiescent at the back of her brain.
But it was there. And now and then, when in a gust of wind the lights and shadows danced on the dim, polished floors, it stirred; and at the sound of wheels on the drive below it leaped, and all her fears again were in her face. At such moments the two women did look deeply at each other, and the suspense, the premonition, hovered in Mrs. Herrick's eyes. It was as unconscious, as involuntary, as Flora's start at the swinging of a door; but no question crossed her lips. She let the matter as severely alone as if it had been a jewel not her own. Yet, it came to Flora all at once that here, for the first time, she was with one to whom she could have revealed the sapphire on her neck and yet remain unchallenged.
"Ah, you're too lovely!" she burst out at last. "It is more than I deserve that you shouldtake it all like this, as if there really wasn't anything." The elder lady's eyes wavered a little at the plain words.
"I'm too deeply doubtful of it to take it any other way," she said.
"That is why I feel most guilty," Flora explained. "For dragging you into it and then—bringing it into your house." She glanced around at the high, quiet, damasked room. "Such a thing to happen here!"
"Ah, my dear,"—Mrs. Herrick's laugh was uncertain—"the things that have happened here—the things that have happened and been endured and been forgotten! and see," she said, laying her hand on one of the walls, "the peace of it now!"
Flora wondered. She seemed to feel such distances of life extending yet beyond her sight as dwindled her, tiny and innocent.
"It isn't what happens, but the way we take it that makes the afterward," Mrs. Herrick added.
The thought of an afterward had stood verydim in Flora's mind, and even now that Mrs. Herrick's words confronted her with it she couldn't fancy what it would be like. She couldn't imagine her existence going on at all on the other side of failure.
"But suppose," she tremulously urged, "suppose there seemed only one way to take what had happened to you, and that way, if it failed, would leave you no afterward at all, no peace, no courage, nothing."
Mrs. Herrick's eyes fixed her with their deep pity and their deeper apprehension. "There are few things so bad as that," she said slowly, "and those are the ones we must not touch."
Flora paused a moment on the brink of her last plunge. "Do you think what I am going to do is such a thing as that?"
"Oh, my poor child, how do I know? I hope, I pray it is not!" Her fingers closed on Flora's hand, and the girl clung to the kind grasp. It was a comfort, though it could not save her from the real finality.
In spite of the consciousness of a friendlypresence in the house her fears increased as the afternoon waned, and her thoughts went back to what she had left behind her, and forward to what might be coming—the one person whom she so longed for, and so dreaded to see. He might be on his way now. He might at this moment be hurrying down the hedged lane from the station; and when he should come, and when they two were face to face, there would be no other "next time" for them. Everything was crystalizing, getting hard. Everything was getting too near the end to be malleable any more. It was her last chance to make him relinquish his unworthy purpose; perhaps his last chance to save himself from captivity. She found she hadn't a thing left unsaid, an argument left unused. What could she do that she had not done before, except to show him by just being here, accessible and ready to serve him at any risk, how much she cared? Could his generosity resist that?
Beyond the fact of getting him away safe she didn't think. Beyond that nothing lookedlarge to her, nothing looked definite. The returning of the sapphire itself seemed simple beside it, and the fact that her position in the matter might never be explained of no importance.
Now while every moment drew her nearer her greatest moment she grew more absent, more strained, more restless, more intently listening, more easily starting at the lightest sound; until, at last, when the late day touched the rooms with fiery sunset colors, her friend, watchful of her changing mood, ready at every point to palliate circumstance, drew her out into the garden.
The wind, which had fallen with approaching evening, was only a whisper among the trees. The greenish-white bodies of statues in the shrubbery glowed ruddy. Gathering their skirts from the grass that glittered with the drops of the last shower, arm in arm the two women walked down the broad central gravel drive between ribbon beds of flowers. From here numerous paths paved with white stone went wandering under snowball trees and wild apple,losing themselves in shrubbery. But one made a clear turn across the lawn for the rose-garden, where in the midst a round pool of water lay like a flaming bit of the sunset sky. Among the bushes red and rose and white, the elder woman in her black, the younger in her gown more glowing, with a veil over her hair, walked, and, loitering, looked down into the water, seeing their faces reflected, and, behind, the tangled brambles and the crimson sky. They did not speak, but at last their companionship was peaceful, was perfect. The only sounds were the sleepy notes of birds and that faint, high whisper of the tree tops on an evening that is not still.
Loud and shrill and shriller and more piercing, from the west wing of the house, overhanging the garden, the sound reached them—an alarum that set Flora's heart to leaping. Startled apart, they listened.
"Would that be—is that for you?"
"I think it's for me."
The words came from them simultaneously, and almost at the same instant Flora had startedacross the lawn. The sight of an aproned maid coming out on the veranda and peering down the garden set her running fleetly.
"It's a telephone for Miss Gilsey," the girl said.
"Oh, thank you," Flora panted.
She knew so well the voice she had expected at the other end of the wire that the husky, boyish note which reached her, attenuated by distance, struck her with dismay and disappointment.
"Ella, oh, yes; yes; Ella." What was she saying? Ella was using the telephone as if it were a cabinet for secrets.
"Clara told me you were down there," she was explaining. "I saw her this morning, yes. Well,"—and she could hear Ella draw in her breath—"I'm so relieved! I thought you'd be, too, to know. Iwasperfectly right. She was after him."
Flora faltered, "After whom?" There flashed through her mind more than one person that, by this time, Clara might possibly be after.
"Why, after papa, of course!" Ella's injured surprise brought her back to the romance of Judge Buller. Her voice rose in sheer bewilderment. "Well?"
Ella's voice rose triumphantly. "I got it out of her myself. I just came right out to her at last. She seemed awfully surprised that I knew; but she owned up to it, and what do you think? I bought her off!"
"Bought her off?" Flora cried. Each fact that Ella brought forth seemed to her more preposterous than the last.
"Why, yes, it's too ridiculous; what do you think she wanted?"
At that question Flora's heart seemed fairly to stand still. That was the very question she had been asking herself for days, and asking in vain.
Ella's voice was coming to her faint as a voice from another world. "She wanted that little, little picture—that picture of the man called Farrell Wand. Don't you remember, papa mentioned it at supper that evening at the club?Isn't it funny she remembered it all this time? Well, she wanted it dreadfully, but Harry wanted it, too, and papa said he had promised it to Harry; but I got it first and gave it to her." Ella's voice ended on a high note of triumph.
Flora's, if anything, rose higher in despair. "Oh, Ella!"
"Doesn't it seem ridiculous," Ella argued, "that if she really wanted him she'd give him up for that?"
"Oh, no—I mean yes," Flora stammered. "Yes, of course! thank you, Ella, very much—very much." The last words were hardly audible. The receiver fell jangling into its bracket, and Flora leaned against the wall by the telephone and closed her eyes.
For a moment all she could see was Clara with that little, little picture. How well she could remember how Clara had looked that night of the club supper!
From the moment Judge Buller had spoken of the picture, how all three of them hadchanged, Clara and Kerr and Harry. Everything that had seemed so phantasmal then, everything she had put down as a figment of her own imagination, had meant just this plain fact. All three of them had wanted the picture. For his own reason Kerr had turned aside from the chase, but Harry had stood with it to the last, and now, when finally the prize had been assured to him, Clara had it!
At this moment she had it in her hand. At this moment she knew what was the aspect of the figure in the picture, whether it showed a face, and, if a face, whose. Flora's hands opened and closed. "Oh," she whispered to the great silence of the great house awaiting him; "where is he? Why isn't he here?"
All those terrible things which might be happening beyond her reach processioned before her. Had Clara already snapped the trap of the law upon Kerr? And if she hadn't yet, what could be done to hold her off? Flora turned again to the telephone. Slowly she took down the receiver and gave into the brightmouthpiece of the instrument the number of her own house.
Presently the voice of Shima spoke to her. Mrs. Britton had gone out to dinner.
"Tell her, Shima," Flora commanded, "tell her to come down on the earliest train." She hesitated, then finished in a firm voice. "Tell her not to do anything until she has seen me."
Shima would tell her—but Mrs. Britton had been out all day. He did not know when she would be back.
The words sounded ominous in Flora's ears. She turned away. Was everything to be finished just as she had light enough to move, but before she had a chance?
The sound of spinning wheels on the drive startled her to fresh hope, and sent her hurrying down the stair. It was the phaëton returning from the last train. Through the open door she saw the figure of Mrs. Herrick expectant on the veranda. Then the carriage came into the porte-cochère and passed. With a rush she reached the veranda, and stood there looking after it. Shewouldn't believe her eyes—she couldn't—that it had returned again empty.