Another burst of hail struck the window. Mrs. Weatherbee turned, listening, and so avoiding Marcia's penetrating eyes, dropped her hand from her own. "I have my raincoat and cap," she said, "and a smart brush with the wind will clear my head of cobwebs."
With this she hurriedly smoothed the letter and laid it between the pages of a book; lifting the violets from the table, she carried them out of the steam-heated apartment to the coolness of the sleeping-porch. Mrs. Feversham followed to the inner room and stood watching her through the open door.
"Violets!" she exclaimed. "At Christmas! From wherever did they come?"
"From Hollywood Gardens," she responded almost eagerly. "Isn't it marvelous how they make the out-of-season flowers bloom? But this flurry of hail is the end of the storm, Marcia; the clouds are breaking, and it is light enough to see the path above the pergola. I shall have time to go as far as the observatory."
Before she finished speaking, she was back in the room and hurrying on her raincoat. Mrs. Feversham began to lay out various toilet accessories, but presently, when the gallery door closed behind Beatriz, she walked to the table near the plate-glass window and picked up the book. It was a morocco-bound edition of Omar's Rubaiyat, which she had often noticed at the apartment in Vivian Court, yet she studied the title deliberately, and also the frontispiece, before she turned to the pages that enclosed the letter. But it was natural that, holding both her brother's and Beatriz Weatherbee's interests so at heart, her scruples should be finally dispelled, and she laid the volume face down, to keep the place, while she read the night nurse's unclinical report. After that she went to the box of violets in the sleeping-porch and found Tisdale's message, and she had slipped the card carefully back and stood looking meditatively off through the open casement when her sister entered from the gallery. At the same time Mrs. Weatherbee appeared on the path above the pergola. But she had not escaped to the solitude she so evidently had desired, for Foster accompanied her. When they stopped to look down on the villa and the little cove where the Aquila rocked at her moorings, Marcia waved her hand gaily, then turned to the brilliant room.
Elizabeth met her at the threshold. "What has sent Beatriz out in this weather?" she asked.
"Why, you see,"—Marcia answered with a little backward gesture to the figures on the slope,—"since this is Stuart Foster's first visit to the villa, he must be personally conducted through the park."
"She tried her best to discourage him. They were standing at the side entrance when I came through the dining-room. She warned him first impressions were everything and that it would be blowing a gale at the observatory; besides, if Frederic was waiting, she would not be responsible."
"But, 'come what will, what may'"—and meeting her sister's look, Marcia's eyes gathered brilliancy—"the man must have his hour."
"That is what he told her. He said the syndicate had had his time and brains, he might as well add his soul, for three months steady, and now he was entitled to his hour. I wonder—" Elizabeth's even voice wavered—"Do you think she will refuse him?"