They went trooping up the staircase, but Hollis did not hurry to follow. His glance moved to the heavy, recumbent figure of his host. He was looking up across the banisters at Mrs. Weatherbee as she ascended, and something in his sensuous face, the steady gleam of his round black eyes, started in Tisdale's mind a sudden suspicion. She stopped to look down from the gallery railing and smiled with a gay little salute. Then Elizabeth called, and she disappeared through an open door.
"I'd give fifty dollars to see her face when she gets to that east room," Morganstein said abruptly. "But go up, Mr. Tisdale; go up. Needn't bother to stay with me."
"There's a good deal to see here," Tisdale responded genially. "A man who is accustomed to spend his time as I do, gathering accurate detail, is slower than others, I suppose, and this all seems very fine to me."
"It's got to be fine,—the finest bungalow on Puget Sound, I keep telling the architect. Nothing short of that will do. Listen!" he added in a smothered voice, "she's in there now."
The vaulted roof carried the echoes down to Tisdale as he went up the stairs. All the doors were open along the gallery; some were not yet hung, but he walked directly to the last one from which the exclamations of surprise had come. And, as he went, he heard Mrs. Weatherbee say: "It was glorious, like this, the day the idea flashed to my mind; but I did not dream Mr. Morganstein would alter the casement, for the men were hanging the French windows. Why, it must have been necessary to change the whole wall. Still, it was worth it, Marcia, was it not?"
"It certainly is unique," admitted Mrs. Feversham. Then Tisdale stopped on the threshold, facing a great window of plate glass in a single pane, designed to frame the incomparable view of Mount Rainier lifting above the sea. And it was no longer a phantom mountain; the haze had vanished, and the great peak loomed near, sharply defined, shining in Alpine splendor.
It was a fine conceit, too fine to have sprung from Morganstein's materialistic brain, and Tisdale was not slow to grasp the truth. The financier had reconstructed the wall to carry out Mrs. Weatherbee's suggestion. Then it came over him that this whole building, feature by feature, had been created to win, to ensnare this woman. It was as though the wall had become a scroll on which was written: "'All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down'—and marry me."
Suddenly the place oppressed him. He walked through the room to the smaller one of the suite and out on a broad sleeping-porch. The casement was nearly waist high, and he stood grasping the ledge and looking with unseeing eyes into a grove of firs. So this was the alternative. And this was why Foster was safe. The young mining engineer, with little besides his pay, had fallen far short of her price.
But the salt wind was in his face; it quieted him. He began to notice the many small intruding influences of approaching night. The bough of a resinous hemlock, soughing gently, touched his arm, and his hold on the shingles relaxed. He moved, to rest the injured hand on the casing, and its throbbing eased. His glance singled out clumps of changing maple or dogwood that flamed like small fires on the slope. Then he caught the rhythm of the tide, breaking far down along the rocky bulkhead; and above, where a footbridge spanned a chasm, a cascade rippled in harmony.
"Nice, isn't it?" said the lieutenant, who came onto the porch with
Elizabeth.