Hartley had to wait in the library for some time; he sat in the dusky, massive room wondering why he should listen so eagerly for Cordelia's step. When she did come down—she had finally surrendered and written him a pitiful, urgent little note complaining of his neglect and her loneliness, and declaring that she must see him at once—she stepped before him resplendent in a shimmering gown of salmon-colored liberty satin, which looked almost yellow in the softened lamplight, subdued by her own careful hand. She was more nervous than she appeared, and she was glad of the half-lights. She had long since discovered that the library was the one room in the Spaulding household where one could sit in assured solitude. The Spauldings, indeed, were not a bookish family, Alfred Spaulding always briskly protesting that he preferred living life to reading it. And when it came to a matter of recreation, he used to say, sixty miles in an automobile knocked the daylights out of sixty chapters of romantic philanderings.
Cordelia came over to Hartley almost timidly, and looked up at him out of her eyes after the manner of a child who had done wrong and had been punished, and was repentant once more.
She was startled to notice the change in him, to see how attenuated and drawn his face was, how worn he looked about the eyes.
"My poor boy!" There was much of the maternal in that little cry. "My poor boy, what is it?" she asked with trembling lip, in her earnestness taking his hand once more.
"Oh, it's nothing. I've been working jolly hard and got a little under the weather," he explained. He could never endure sympathy.
"And you never told me!" There was a touch of more than kindness, of more than melancholy reproof, in the unconsciously softened voice. It seemed to rend all the fogs that had muffled and darkened life.
"And now, heigho, I feel like a holiday!" he cried as he told her, half ashamed of the softer mood that stole over him, how much had been accomplished with The Unwise Virgins.
"Why, surely you haven't finished it—so soon?"
"Not finished, altogether, but the bulk of the work is done."