"Honest?"
"Cross my heart to die. And—thanks—awfully——"
"Nonsense."
Belle opened the door and went briskly down the hall. Anne closed it softly, turned out the light, undressed and threw the window as wide as she could. Between the smooth, fresh sheets she lay waiting tensely for silence to settle on the house and leave her quite alone with her own thoughts.
At last Belle and her mother went downstairs, her father wound the cuckoo clock, the door below slammed and Hilda came slowly up. The hall light went out. Silence had come.
In the soft, black stillness, Roger Barton stood out clearly, his crisp blond hair electric with vitality, his wide mouth now tight with repressed anger, now whimsical with mirth.
Would he really look her up?
CHAPTER FOUR
For two days Roger Barton luxuriated in his escape from the law. At twenty-eight all experience had to him the nature of a material thing. It was to be grasped, used to his need, and when it failed him, dropped. He absorbed what his mind needed at the time and went on, as an animal leaves a food supply, its wants satisfied. University and law school had been the road to an education offered by a distant, childless relative with an ambition to have a profession in the family. Roger now wrote and told this relative he had given up the law, but the old man's irate answer did not disturb him in the least. He did not feel that he had been ungrateful or that he owed anything beyond the power of his own conscience to pay.
He had no definite plans for the future, except a general feeling that he was about to enter a real and interesting world. In this world there were fine, high things to do, and he would probably be poor, for John Lowell's office had convinced Roger that ideals do not pay and that nothing else is worth while. He took long tramps through the Marin hills, or lay on the sand at Land's End listening to the waves, and dreamed. In these dreams he thought often of Anne, standing on tiptoes before John Lowell. Now that he would probably never see her again he wished that he knew her better.