III
It was the first of May, and the day before Clare's birthday. It was one of the most beautiful days of the year, with a hint of summer in its light and shadow, a shimmer of golden sun shaking through the trees in the orchard, flung from there on to the windows of The Roundabout, to dance in twisting lines along the floors and across the walls.
All doors and windows seemed to be open; the scent of flowers—a prophecy of pinks and roses where as yet there were none—flooded the little Chelsea streets.
The Velasquez on the walls of The Roundabout danced in her stiff skirts, looking down upon a room bathed in green and gold shadow.
It was three o'clock in the afternoon and Peter was going out to buy Clare a present. He had seen a ruby pendant many months ago in a window in Bond Street. He had thought of it for Clare but he had known that, with young Stephen's education and the rest of the kid's expenses, he could not dare to afford it. Now... things were different.
It should sign and seal this new order....
He came downstairs. He looked into the little sitting-room. Clare was standing there by the window looking at the gay trees in the orchard. On the opposite wall the Velasquez danced....
She had not heard him come in and she was standing by the window with her hands clasped tightly behind her, her body strung up, so it seemed, by some height of determination. She wore a black dress with a little white round her neck and at the sleeves. Her hair was rolled into a pile on the top of her head and the sunlight from the orchard was shining upon it.
When Peter called her name she turned round with a startled cry and put her hand to her throat. Then she moved back against the window as though she were afraid that he was going to touch her.
He noticed her movement and the words that he had intended to say were checked on his lips. He stammered, instead, something about going out. She nodded her head; she had pulled herself together and walked towards him from the window.
“Won't you come, too? It is such a lovely day,” he asked her.
“I've got a headache.”
“It'll do your headache good.”
But she shook her head—“No, I'm going upstairs to lie down.”
She moved past him to the door. Then with her hand on it she turned back to him:—
“Peter, I—” she said.
She seemed to appeal to him with her eyes beseeching, trying to say something, but the rest of her face was dumb.
The appeal, the things that she would have said suddenly died, leaving her face utterly without expression.
“Bobby and mother are coming to dinner to-night, aren't they?”
“Yes—”
She passed through the door across the sunlit hall, up the dark stairs. She walked with that hesitating halting step that he knew so well: her small, white hand lay, for a moment on the banisters—then she had disappeared.