Before Yetta knew what was happening to her she was in the motor. In fifteen minutes they were out of the city, and Mrs. Karner put her arm about her.
"It was such a very little they asked for," Yetta muttered. "Not so much as we vest-makers demanded."
Mrs. Karner did not see fit to reply, and Yetta fell back into a sort of doze. At last they turned through a stone gateway into the Karners' place. She got only a hurried glance at the well-watered lawn and the open stretch of the Sound. She was rushed upstairs and to bed. In the morning Mrs. Karner would not let her get up. It was the first time Yetta had spent a day in bed.
When she was allowed to get up, she found the estate a strange country to be explored. The greenhouses, the tame deer, the spotless stables, the dairy, the kennels, the boat-house, all were endlessly interesting to her. Interesting enough to make her forget for a while the horrors of New York. It was the third day that she made friends with the gardener, and after that she got up with the sun to help him harvest the poppies.
On Friday Mr. Karner appeared, with a man and his wife, whose name Yetta never troubled herself to remember, and they all went off for a week-end cruise. Most of the time the older people played bridge. Yetta made friends with the sea and a gray-haired old sailor from the Azores, who could speak nothing but Portuguese. Once while at anchor he helped her catch a fish. She would have enjoyed the cruise more if they had let her eat in the forecastle with the crew. She liked Mrs. Karner very much when they were alone together, but it was unpleasant to see her with these others.
In time the color returned to Yetta's cheeks, and hearing that Mabel had torn up her resignation, she went back to Washington Square and to work.
Except for such crises, Yetta followed rigorously the course of reading which Walter had mapped out for her. The afternoons and evenings belonged to the work of the League, to the very busy life of the real world. The mornings belonged to Walter. Her first thought was always of him. While the coffee was heating, she attended to his mail. After breakfast, with his prospectus spread out before her, she settled herself in one of his chairs and took up one of his books. Following his suggestion she made copious notes, and, when a book was finished, she wrote a thousand words or so on the main ideas she had gained from it. She carefully saved all these notes. When he returned he would see how thoroughly she had followed his directions.
On the other side of the world from Yetta, Longman was leading a rough, exciting tent-life among dangerously fanatic natives. It would have been hard to imagine two more sharply contrasting environments. He never dreamed of the loving devotion which was being offered him, so many thousand miles away. He did not suspect how his occasional letters, in reply to her weekly ones, fanned this flame. He was wholly occupied in racing against time and difficulties to complete his work.
The expedition was not having an easy time of it. The ruins about which they were digging were regarded by the natives with superstitious veneration. The little group of scientists had only a score of unreliable soldiers for defence, so the real men—Le Marquis d'Hauteville, Chef de l'expédition, a wiry, gray-haired veteran of the Algerian Wars; Delanoue, a dandified-looking Parisian, who had carved his name as an explorer in all sorts of outlandish places; Vibert, the photographer, and Walter—had their hands full. They were the rampart, behind which the half-dozen querulous, rather old-maidish specialists measured skulls, gathered fragments of pottery, took rubbings of inscriptions, and collected folk-lore.
It is very much easier to love a person who is absent than to live amicably at close quarters with his daily faults and foibles. As the months passed, Walter Longman—or rather the ghost which Yetta conjured up to that name—took on new graces, was endowed with ever more brilliant characteristics. Yetta hardly knew the real man. In their half-dozen meetings she had seen certain charming traits. He came to typify the kind of life she would like to lead. A life of cleanliness and comfort, but free from the shame of luxury. A life of books, but so close and sympathetic to the struggling mass of humanity as to escape the reproach of pedantry.