"I will go down there this afternoon," she says, with alacrity.
"You will do no such thing. No doubt your brother has engaged Eugene to entertain his wife in his absence. For business men they are both——"
The servant comes in and the sentence is unfinished. But Jasper Wilmarth is thinking that no doubt the handsome young man is very pleasing to Mrs. Floyd Grandon, and if the husband should wake up some day on the verge of a scandal, why, it will be one of those rare strokes of accidental, otherwise poetic justice.
Marcia does go "home," as they still call the place. Eugene is not about and Mrs. Latimer is spending the afternoon in an old-fashioned way with a nurse and two children. Marcia's fine moral sense is shocked at the duplicity of Mrs. Floyd, and she announces the fact to her husband at dinner, to which he replies with an uncomfortable laugh.
Eugene brings Violet a letter on his return, and her face is illumined with eager joy. She cannot wait to retire becomingly to her own room, but breaks the seal on the porch, and is deep in its contents.
"Oh!" she cries at first, in disappointment.
"Floyd has gone on to Chicago," announces Eugene. "Wilmarth turned black as a thunder-cloud over the news. He scents treason, stratagems, and conspiracies."
Violet looks up in curious amaze. "Mr. Grandon will never do anything—that is not right," she adds, after a moment.
Eugene shrugs his shoulders. "What may be right enough for him might hit Wilmarth hard," says the young man, and the tone implies that he would rather enjoy the hard hitting.
Violet hardly hears that. She colors delicately over the remainder of the letter, which is not long, but touches her inexpressibly. He misses her amid all this haste and turmoil, and it is sweet to be so dear to him, that he really wants her, that he would like to be at home with her.